Nature's Shift (4 page)

“Well,” said Professor Crowthorne, “
that
's quite a privilege.”

“Is it?” replied, automatically. My voice was a trifle hoarse, so the acid sarcasm didn't quite come out as intended.

“What do you suppose she wants?” the professor asked, curiously.

What do you think she wants, you silly old fool?
I didn't reply. Aloud, and meekly, all I said was: “I expect she wants to ask me about Rowland. She probably imagines that we're still in touch. She wants to ask me why he's not here—she probably thinks he told me that he wasn't going to come, and left it to me to explain why.”

“I was surprised when he didn't come in with the rest of the family,” the professor observed, although he'd already expressed his surprise more eloquently than any mere report could contrive. Reaching for even deeper levels of banality, he added: “A pity, that—I was hoping to see him. Surely he must have warned his mother that he wasn't going to be here, though?”

I shouldn't have come
, I thought. “Actually,” I said, “Rowland being Rowland, I'd have been surprised if he
had
given Rosalind prior notice of his absence. But I'm genuinely surprised that he isn't here. I expected him to be here. I suppose I'm not surprised that he didn't warn me either—but I wish he had.”

“Rather bad form, in my opinion,” Professor Crowthorne continued. “I mean, there's nothing unusual about boys falling out with their mothers, especially when their mothers are as…forceful…as Ms. Usher—but missing your own sister's funeral! And the closest sister of them all! I know they weren't really twins, in the sense that they shared a womb, but they were the same age.”

Rowland and Magdalen had been incubated ectogenetically, and they were the produce of different sperm-donors, but they had, indeed, been born within a few hours of one another, having always been envisaged as a pair: a dedicated symbiotic unit.

“How old are you and Rowland now?” the professor went on, when I didn't step in to fill his pause. “Thirty-six? Thirty-seven? Too old to be nursing adolescent grudges, that's for sure. This could have been a golden opportunity to build bridges, mend fences, heal wounds. Rowland should have been here, for his own sake as well as his mother's.”

And mine
, I thought. “It's not that easy,” I said, weakly. “We're in a brave new world now. The old clichés don't apply any more.”

“Are you quoting Shakespeare or Huxley?” he asked, although the obvious answer was both. “Either way, you're wrong. The whole point of the Usher family's endeavors has been to save and preserve the civilization we took thousands of years to build, and they succeeded. They weren't alone, of course, but there was no one more committed than they were to the cause. The old norms still apply—and so they should, since we had to fight so hard to preserve them. Rowland should have been here.”

Obviously, I wasn't the only one who felt resentful that my hopes and expectations had been dashed. I'd moved on from there, though. The fact that my hopes of seeing Rowland had been relegated to the dead past was now a mere matter of circumstance. What was occupying my mind at present was the fact that Rosalind wanted to see me. She had fixed a rendezvous for four o'clock, at the Pyramid—although she naturally reserved the right to be late, if more pressing matters of duty intervened.

She undoubtedly wanted to ask me about Rowland—and I didn't have anything to tell her. If there was one prospect in the world more terrifying than being summoned into the imperial presence to bear witness, it was that of being summoned into the presence knowing in advance that I was not in a position to satisfy her desire. I had nothing to tell her, and I knew that telling her nothing, however honest and accurate it might be, was not going to satisfy her.

“I wish I could keep you company,” Professor Crowthorne said, perhaps sincerely. “I'd quite like to take a look around the Palaces, and I'm sure that you could give me the next best thing to a family-guided tour, but I'm at the mercy of the train timetable, and I have to get back to the Great Wen tonight. I'll have to walk to the station—there's no prospect of a taxi, given the size of the crowd.”

I wondered whether he knew where the custom of referring to London as “the Great Wen” had originated, but I wasn't about to ask him, or attempt any kind of discussion about the Romantic response to the Industrial Revolution, and I certainly wasn't about to make any observation about Hell being a city much like London. He was right about the impossibility of getting a cab, though. There was already a considerable outflow through the gate, and the vehicles lying in wait had already been commandeered. We were in rural Devon, after all—the local taxi, while not exactly an endangered species, was something of a
rara avis
. At least half of the invitees were evidently familiar with Eden, and had no need to take advantage of Rosalind's invitation to look around, so there was something of a mass exodus in progress..

“That's all right,” I said. “I'll walk with you, if you like—I'll have plenty of time to get back here again before four, even if your train's late.”

I meant no more than I said, but my mind was still a little numb. Was I secretly harboring an intention to hop on the London train with him, in order to pick up a northbound connection from Bristol before nightfall?—so secretly that I dared not even confess it to myself. Perhaps. After all, I had the same excuse as he did. By the time I had seen Rosalind at four, it wouldn't be possible for me to get all the way back to Lancaster by train; I'd have to stay overnight, in Bristol or Birmingham if not in Exeter. I too was at the mercy of the timetable—but there had been no possibility of saying that to Rosalind's face while I was in a handshaking queue, so the only possibility I had of acting on temptation was to slip away quietly, and simply not turn up to the abruptly-scheduled meeting. Rosalind could hardly deem that a terrible sin, given that her own son had failed to turn up to his twin sister's funeral, of which he must have been given adequate notice.

The professor was obviously not averse to the idea having company on the walk, we set off together—but as we approached the gate, I saw the security men exchange glances. They were inside the gates, now, bidding polite farewells to the exiting crowd. In imitation of their employer, they did indeed bid Professor Crowthorne a polite farewell, and thanked him warmly for coming. To me, however, the man in charge said: “Rosalind would prefer it if you would remain in the grounds, Mr. Bell.”

Even her Praetorian Guard referred to her by her given name, and not as “Ms. Usher.”

That was all that was said—there was no vestige of a threat. I could not imagine that any of the burly men would physically retrain me if I insisted on leaving, even if I didn't tell them that I intended to come straight back after seeing the professor off. The simple fact was, however, that “Rosalind would prefer it if I would remain in the grounds,” and they could not imagine that anyone in the world would not want to comply with Rosalind's preferences, today of all days.

The professor certainly couldn't imagine it. “It's perfectly all right, Peter,” he assured me. “I really don't mind walking on my own. It was good to see you again. We really must make more effort to keep in touch. Occasions like this serve as a salutary reminder of the need to maintain contacts, don't you think?”

“Yes,” I said, “they certainly do.”

I let him walk away, while I turned back, a prisoner of my error. I shouldn't have come—but I had, and now I was trapped. Now I had to face up to Rosalind, unarmed.

CHAPTER FOUR

Having little or no alternative, I did as Rosalind had suggested, and took a stroll around Eden—or, more specifically, its Crystal Palaces. I was by no means the only person taking advantage of Rosalind's regal invitation, but I no longer felt part of a crowd going with a general flow. None of the other strollers in the great glass houses was waiting for an interview with Rosalind; in that respect, I was alone, and that was exactly how I felt. I was no longer
in the company
of those who had merely been given the freedom of the grounds and were taking advantage of the fact. I was moving through a parallel reality, in a different direction.

Relatively few of my fellow mourners were prisoners of the railway timetable, of course. Only the rich have private cars nowadays, but there weren't very many people who could count themselves intimates of Magdalen and Rosalind who weren't either rich or employees, and none of the employees had far to go if and when they left the grounds. Those who were prisoners of the timetable had grabbed all the available taxis, or settled for walking to the station, but there were plenty of people in no hurry, who welcomed the opportunity to take a peek at the latest wonders of the Hive of Industry. Under different circumstances, I might have thought the opportunity welcome myself, but as things were, I experienced my freedom to roam as a mere mockery, an ironic inversion of my captivity.

There was a sense, of course, in which Rosalind's Crystal Palaces were merely glorified greenhouses, some of them laid out as showcases of past achievements, others dedicated to the careful cultivation of plants that weren't yet ready, or licensed, for outdoor cultivation. The time was long gone when plants needed much protection from the British weather, which had been well-disciplined by the ingenious wind farms that surrounded the shores of the various islands in the group, reducing transatlantic hurricane-relics to light breezes that the Met Office could virtually steer at will, but experimentation demanded conditions controlled to a much finer degree than practical meteorologists could contrive, and many of the Hive's products were, in any case, designed for hotter climes than ours. At least half the palaces were tropical.

The tropical houses were the most popular with certain elements of the remaining crowd, but I was working up enough of a sweat without assistance, so I stuck to the temperate ones. I wasn't running any risk of being dosed with insidious psychotropics: the flowers producing active scents were all being grown under bell-jars, with networks of rubber tubing to siphon off the product for concentration and testing. The plants that didn't have that double layer of insulation were guaranteed harmless, and the fact that each and every species was accompanied in the grounds of its own palace by its specialist pollinator didn't create any risk of being stung. The first thing that Roderick the Great had done in producing new bee species by the score had been to take away their weaponry. His collaborators had not been able to do the same with the wasp species they had engineered as specialist predators, but wasps were becoming rare now, at least in England, having done their designated jobs so efficiently as to reduce the pest populations they were attacking to minimum reproductive level.

“Minimum reproductive level” was another of Roderick's catch-phrases. “Extinction” was not merely a dirty word nowadays but a dirty concept; he had never seen it as part of his mission to drive any organism to extinction—merely to render those that were inconvenient to human need and human comfort rare and unobtrusive. The effects of the ecocatastrophe had, of course, resulted in a dramatic loss of biodiversity in every stratum of the ecosphere, but Roderick had wanted to keep his hands clean in that respect, and he could legitimately claim that the increase in biodiversity prompted by the application of his methods had offered considerable compensation for Nature's slaughter.

All in all, though, the insects had come through the holocaust reasonably well. Even species whose extinction would not have raised a single tear had pulled through. Bedbugs and various species of human louse still survived—but not in the beds or on the heads of honest citizens of the British Republic…or, for that matter, dishonest ones.

I was able to take an interest in the plants, of course; I would have been able to do that even if they had simply been pretty and nicely-perfumed, but I still had some expertise in flower design left over from my days at university, so I was better able than any mere gawker to appreciate the effort that was on display in Rosalind's showcases and experimental plots. From the viewpoint of her current thinking,
everything
on public display was presumably old hat to a greater or lesser degree, but innovation moved so rapidly in the Hive of Industry that even material that Rosalind had recently cast aside as
passé
still seemed state-of-the-art to a specialist in marine algae.

I was impressed by the sexiness of the flowers, and not because the bell-jars containing those engineered to produce synthetic pheromones were leaking. The sexiness of flowers had long been one of Rosalind's preoccupations, and she had not been immune to educative zeal herself in the days when I had visited Eden with Rowland. She it was, in person, who had lectured me on the historical ramifications of the strange controversy that the great Linnaeus had caused by electing, on rational grounds, to make the reproductive organs of plants the basis for his classification—a decision that some censorious individuals had condemned as obscene. Of course, she had dutifully pointed out, the cause of immodest rationality had not been helped by the fact that writers like Thomas Stretser had immediately co-opted the vocabulary of Linnaean botany for use as a euphemistic code for description of the functioning of the human genitalia, in such classics of perverse pornography as
The Natural History of the Frutex Vulvaria; or, Flowering Shrub
and
Arbor Vitae; or, The Natural History of the Tree of Life,
both by-lined Philogynes Clitorides. Rosalind owned illustrated editions of both texts, as well as first editions of Erasmus Darwin's
The Botanic Garden
, including his poetic account of “The Loves of the Plants,” and Sir William Jones's translation of the floral-erotic Indian epic
Sacontalá
. She was also the proud owner of several paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe.

As an honored visitor to Eden, I had been required to study all those specimens of peculiar eroticism, not only in Rosalind's company but in Magadalen's—and, of course, Rowland's. It had not been an entirely comfortable series of experiences.

“Flowers evolved in order to be beautiful,” Rosalind had once told me, “and not merely to be beautiful, but to be sensual. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking that because natural selection designed them to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of insects, any appeal they make to human aesthetics is mere coincidence. Beauty
is
in the eye of the beholder, not to mention the organs of touch, hearing, taste and smell, but in terms of what our sense organs report to us, and how that information is neurologically translated into sensation and experience, all complex organisms have a great deal more in common than was once imagined. You're a geneticist, so you're well enough aware of the degree of kinship that exists between all organisms.”

“Some insects are beautiful too,” I remembered pointing out, “but some very definitely aren't.”

“And some are both,” Rowland had chipped in. “Butterflies, dragonflies and the like all start off as ugly larvae.”

“Which means,” Rosalind had observed, “that beauty is attainable, even from ugly raw material, if only you have the trick of it. That what the real mission of genetic engineering is: to produce beauty…including, and perhaps especially, the beauty that is the true soul of erotic attraction, and stands in desperate need of purification.”

Given that kind of mind-set on the part of the genius of the place, it's hardly surprising that the Crystal Palaces of Eden were filled with flowers that were truly beautiful, not merely in terms of their color, design and scent but in terms of the way they felt to the touch: their softness and their delicacy. It wasn't the case that every bed of flowers was an orgy of sorts, but it was impossible not to take the suggestion that they might be: that botanical debauchery was not only possible, but potentially capable of surpassing any other kind. There were flowers whose petals were colored in such a way as to resemble child-like faces, and flowers designed to recall other parts of the human anatomy. Natural selection had, of course, got there long before Rosalind, in the artistry of orchids, but natural selection had always been an amateur, and had always been slow in its endeavors. Rosalind was a professional, and lightning fast by comparison.

Not only did the time pass quickly as I wandered, lonely as a cloud, through hosts of every kind of flower under the sun, but I actually began to enjoy myself, once I had settled my mind to absorption in my surroundings and shoved anxiety aside,
pro tempore
.

What, after all, did I have to worry about? Rosalind would ask me about Rowland; I would explain, apologetically, that I hadn't heard from him; end of story. She wouldn't want to spin things out any longer than I did, today of all days. All she wanted was to ask a question, and it wasn't my fault that I didn't have the ghost of an answer. I wouldn't even mention the inconvenience that she'd caused me; I'd simply take the next available train to Bristol, and stay overnight there while awaiting the first northbound train in the morning. It was no big deal.

There is something essentially restful about the beauty of temperate flowers, and the quiet hum of friendly insects. Perhaps there was also a little something in the air of the Palaces, in spite of the bell-jars—something tranquilizing, if not actually euphoric.

It was not until five to four that I presented myself at the main door of the pyramid, and explained to the concierge that I had an appointment with Rosalind. I suspect that he was well aware of it, and only made a show of checking his palm to remind me who was boss, but he let me in, and had a junior employee guide me to the appropriate reception-room.

The pyramid was a very large structure; although its footprint was only a little larger than that of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, it was a good deal taller, its four faces being much more steeply sloped. The elevator buttons were numbered all the way up to thirty-two, but I knew that there were at least four floors above that, accessible only by strictly private means.

I was taken up to thirty, which seemed a little high for my obvious unimportance in the scheme of the Hive's dealings, although I had been up considerably higher in the past. The room into which I was shown had a spectacular view, not merely of Eden but a substantial fraction of Exmoor, but I didn't go to the window to stare out. I don't usually suffer unduly from acrophobia, but I felt that the last thing I needed at present was any hint of vertigo. Instead, I sat down and waited.

Punctuality, they say, is the politeness of princes—which primitive generalization embraces queens—but Rosalind wasn't being insulting in turning up twenty minutes late. She really was having a very busy day, and she had a lot on her mind.

She offered me a drink. I asked for a glass of water. She poured it for me, along with something a little stronger for herself.

“Thank you for coming, Peter,” she said, by way of an opening. “Magdalen would have wanted you to be here.” Then she added: “I assume that Rowland didn't tell you he wouldn't be coming, any more than he told us?” That wrong-footed me completely, shattering all my expectations at a stroke.

“I haven't heard from him recently,” I said, glad to be able to offer it as a confirmation rather than an unwelcome reply to a probing inquiry.”

Rosalind sat down beside me. I tried to tell myself that she wasn't trying to be intimidating, that she found close proximity no other human beings as awkward as I did, but I knew how disciplined she was, and how determined. She looked directly into my eyes. I couldn't sustain her gaze for more than a second, now, even though I had trained myself, ten years before, to meet even her gaze, if and when the occasion warranted it, for as long as a minute.

Think of her as a work of art
, I had told myself, then.
Think of her as an artifice of exquisite beauty, not as a conscious human being. And if all else fails, remember that she's a scientist, with a mind trained to objectivity
.

There was no possibility of any psychological ploy of that sort working now. I tried to concentrate hard on my glass of water, looking down into its transparent depths.

She actually reached out and put her hand on my wrist, in a confidential and affectionate manner that was completely different from a formal and impersonal handshake. I had never known her do that before, even to Rowland or Magdalen.

“I'm worried about him, Peter,” she said. “I need to ask you for a favor.”

Oddly enough, that hit me like a bolt from the blue. In retrospect, perhaps I should have expected it. In retrospect, it almost seemed obvious—but it hadn't seemed obvious in advance. Queen Rosalind of the Hive of Industry was asking me for a favor. Even though there was no logical reason why she shouldn't, the idea had seemed somehow unthinkable.

“What favor?” I said, warily, and perhaps not altogether politely. In retrospect, I should have asked: “Why are you worried about him?”—but I didn't. I had to know what favor it was that she wanted from me.

She was still touching my arm. “I want you to go to Venezuela,” she said. “I want you to visit Rowland—not for my sake, I hasten to add, but for his.”

I was so stunned I had virtual concussion. “Venezuela?” I repeated feebly. “I can't….” That was entirely the wrong way to go about it, of course.

“Yes you can,” said Rosalind, firmly. “Whatever obstacles are in your path can be cleared. If you need some sort of financial recompense, you only have to say the word—but I know that it's not something you'd do for money. It's something you'll do because you're Rowland's friend, and because he needs you. You do still think of yourself as his friend, don't you?”