Nature's Shift (6 page)

“No problem,” he said. “Just let me know what you need, and I'll make what advance provision I can. We can sort out the details when you're here. There are inevitable delays in delivery way out here, but money talks, and I have plenty of that, thanks to dear old Roderick. I don't say that the impossible gets done at once when I snap my fingers, and even the possible takes time, but whatever we need, I can get.”

I appreciated the
we
.

“That's great,” I said—and bade him a temporary farewell, in order to set the wheels in motion.

That proved a good deal easier than might have been expected. I had to apply for instantaneous sabbatical leave, and provide immediate cover for all my teaching obligations. Given that one normally has to apply for sabbatical leave a year in advance, the dean of the faculty could have protested, but he didn't raise a murmur. I suspected, but didn't dare ask, that he'd already been contacted by the Hive, which had let him know that Rosalind would be greatly obliged if no obstacles appeared in my path, and that anything necessary to clear potential obstacles would be made available on request.

There is no one in the world more tractable than a university dean who has just been assured that any and all expenses will be met without question.

Since Rowland had raised the possibility spontaneously, I hesitated briefly over the matter of taking a lab assistant with me. Given that I really did intend to do some significant research while I was in a uniquely useful environment, an extra pair of hands would have been very useful, and I would undoubtedly have had my pick of the departmental research students had I cared to exploit that resource. No aspiring doctoral candidate would turn down the chance of a field trip to Rowland Usher's Orinoco redoubt, even if it delayed their thesis submission; as an item on a CV, it would be job-application gold. Indeed, even after I had decided to go alone, as soon as the news of my imminent departure for Venezuela got around, explicit requests were made that were practically pleas, and I felt bad about turning them down—and not because at least one of them had an implicit offer of sexual favors thrown into the attempted bargain as a makeweight.

I had to keep reminding myself that my primary purpose in making the trip was to make sure that Rowland was safe and sane, and that he would long remain so. I owed it to him not to clutter up the mission with too many potential distractions. Besides which, Rosalind might not have approved.

Inevitably, once I'd called Rowland to give him the provisional details of my itinerary, and had started packing for my departure, Rosalind called.

“Thank you, Peter,” she said. “I really appreciate what you're doing.”

I could have told her that I was doing it for Rowland, not for her, but it would have been dreadfully impolite, and perhaps not entirely honest. In reality, I was doing it for myself. What I said instead was: “I'm not going to be able to furnish you with full and regular reports from the Orinoco delta. If Rowland doesn't want me to call, I won't.”

“I know that,” she said. “I trust you to do everything possible to make sure that he's all right.”

“You knew perfectly well that he was alive, when you talked to me in Eden, didn't you?” I said, to make sure that she didn't get off too lightly. “You must have some kind of spy-eye in the vicinity of his redoubt, if not actually inside.”

“I knew that he was alive,” she confirmed. “I'm sorry if I accidentally implied that there was a possibility that he wasn't.”

“You wouldn't happen to know what the secret is that he's so determined to keep under wraps until he's ready to whip the curtain away, would you?”

“No, I don't,” she said. “Nor am I expecting you to tell me what it is, once he's confided it to you. I just want to know that he's safe and sane—and I'm convinced that a few weeks and months in your company will increase the probability of his remaining safe and sane considerably.”

I figured that I had built up a considerable balance of moral credit by now, and that Rosalind was as well-disposed to me at that moment as she'd ever been, or ever would be, so I screwed up my courage and asked
the
question.

“Why did Magdalen kill herself?” I asked, coming straight out with it because there as no way of approaching it subtly—although I didn't lose a second in adding; “I need to know, if I'm to talk to Rowland about it—and you do want me to talk to Rowland about it, don't you?”

For just a moment, Rosalind let her mask slip. She was on camera; she wasn't filtering her image. Even though she must have been expecting the question, at some stage, she wasn't quite ready for it at that moment. Perhaps she never would be.

“What makes you think she killed herself?” she hedged. I'd never seen her hedge before; it made her seem almost human.

“If she hadn't,” I said, “you would have identified the cause of death at the funeral. Some secrets can't be kept, because the mere fact of trying to keep them is revelation enough.”

“You're wrong about that,” she snapped back. “Uncertainty is uncertainty, no matter how confident people are in their guesses. But you're right that you'll have to talk to Rowland about it, so I'll confirm your guess, and trust to your sense of honor not to let what I tell you go any further. You can tell him that Magdalen was poisoned, in circumstances which make it highly unlikely that the poisoning was accidental, and that she certainly wasn't murdered. As to why it happened…well, she didn't leave an explanatory note, and she didn't reveal very much in the conversations we had. I won't say that your guess is as good as mine, because it couldn't be, but any conjecture I offered regarding the exact causes of Magdalen's death, except in terms of immediate physical causation, would be just that: a guess.”

That struck me as most un-Rosalind-like speech. It was almost as if she were deliberately beating around the bush, emphasizing what she didn't know in order to avoid specifying what she did know.”

“Were you treating her?” I asked. “With psychotropics, I mean?”

“That's not relevant,” she told me. “If I were, it would be entirely legal—I'm a licensed practitioner.”

I hadn't been in the least concerned about matters of legality, and she knew it. She was deliberately misunderstanding me. Magdalen's death was obviously a very sore topic. Had I been in her presence, I would have apologized profusely for overstepping the mark, but over the phone, I felt that I had more license to ask questions.

She obviously thought so too. “This isn't a suitable topic for discussion over the phone,” she said, flatly. “It might be useful for us to meet again before you leave, though. You'll have to stay overnight in a hotel at Heathrow before catching your flight to Trinidad. I'll meet you there. Don't expect any sensational revelations—I don't have any to offer—but I do have a few things to say, about Magdalen, and about Rowland. You won't have to tie yourself in knots trying to conceal the source of the information from Rowland; he's not a fool, and he'll know that I've talked to you. He won't suspect you of being my agent because of it.”

“I'm not,” I reminded her.

“I know that,” she replied. “The important thing is that Rowland knows it too. We'll talk again before you leave.”

That was the end of the conversation, for the time being

CHAPTER SIX

Within forty-eight hours, all the loose ends had been tidied up. Not only was the flight to Trinidad booked, but a car had been hired to take me directly to the island's coast, where a boat would be waiting to ferry me all the way to the delta. I was able to call Rowland and give him an estimated time of arrival. We'd already had a discussion about the lab facilities I'd need, in order that we could make a comprehensive list of materials for which we'd have to place orders, and he was now able to tell me that the equipment and supplies he'd ordered would be loaded on to the boat before I reached it. It all seemed slightly surreal, partly because of the pace at which it as all happening, and partly because all the discussion of timetables and equipment orders made it seem as if we were carefully avoiding the real subject of mutual interest—as, indeed, we were.

The train journey from Lancaster to London seemed longer than it ever had before, and even the Heathrow shuttle seemed to take its time, although it was a comparatively short journey. There was no sign of Rosalind when I arrived at the hotel, but I hadn't expected her to be there. She would want to meet in the guaranteed privacy of her own car, not some public building. I'd hardly had time to tidy myself up a little in the room, however, before the call came through summoning me to the lobby again. I recognized the man who was waiting for me there as the petty Saint Peter who'd been manning the gates of Eden during the funeral. He was evidently her rock.

The car that was waiting in the forecourt was a black sedan with opaque windows—nothing as ostentatious as a limousine. It looked like a glorified taxi, and when I climbed into the back I saw that it did, indeed, have a privacy partition like a taxi. The partition was raised, even though rocks are legendary for their deaf-muteness.

“Thank you for coming, Peter,” Rosalind said, although I had been under the impression that I had been the one to demand the information that she was about to impart, or at least dance around. Apparently, she didn't want to cast herself as the proverbial mountain making an improbable concession to some mere mortal who didn't even have a prophet's credentials.

“No problem,” I said, and waited. She knew the agenda as well as I did.

For a long moment, however, she was content to look at me, studying me with her gaze. I honestly don't think that she was trying to intimidate me, or to emphasize her authority in any way. She really was studying me, perhaps even wondering whether it really might have made a difference if Magdalen had been prepared to suffer me as a lover, or as a suitor—and whether, if so, there was anything that she might have been able to do to further that eventuality.

In the meantime, the car took off, initially turning south-eastwards along the M25.

When Rosalind finally broke the silence, it was to begin long before what I might have identified as the appropriate beginning. “Do you know why I never had any more sons after Rowland?” she asked.

I figured that she was probably expecting a negative answer, and that the question had only been asked as a prelude to an explanation, but as it happened, I thought that I did know the answer—or, at least, that I could make a guess that wouldn't leave me looking foolish if she had something else in mind. What I actually said, therefore, was: “I believe so.”

Her eyes didn't grow wide with astonishment—in fact, they narrowed slightly with suspicion. “What did Rowland tell you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I replied. “In fact, when we talked about the matter, I was the one who initiated the discussion and made the suggestion. I have an interest in those sorts of genetic choices too, remember.”

She had probably forgotten, but it only took the slightest of prompts to remind her. “Of course,” he said, nodding her head slightly. “Peter Bell the Third. You're part of a scientific dynasty too—but you weren't selected in the same way as my children.”

“Not the same way,” I confirmed. “My grandfather thought he knew exactly what he was doing, though, when he decided to produce an heir, and so did my father. They could hardly be unaware, given the advancement of genetics and neurology during their lifetimes. They both knew that taking what measures they could to produce a son pre-equipped to be a scientist carried certain risks…and potential penalties. They had their own experiences to draw on, and they both had to justify the decision to go the clonal route. I don't think it ever occurred to either of them that it might be safer to find a wife or a surrogate and produce a daughter instead…or as well. I have no sisters, and no aunts, except on my mother's side.”

“Do you regret that?” she was quick to ask.

“Not particularly,” I said. “I suppose I did envy Rowland, more than a little, back in the day, and there would have been a certain beautiful symmetry about our little molecule of community if I'd had a sister too…but no, I don't regret it, now.”

“That's wise,” she said. “Regret is a burden, if not a poison.”

The car had already turned off the M25 at the first southward exit, but I didn't imagine for a moment that we were heading for the coast. I assumed that the driver had instructions to follow a vaguely circular course, so that we'd always be within comfortable striking range of Heathrow, able to make a swift return once Rosalind decided that the interview was over.

I didn't attempt to fill the conversational gap. I waited for Rosalind to begin speaking again, and she did. She didn't ask me to fill out what I'd meant by “I believe so”; she was prepared to take the hint from my remarks about my own family history as evidence that I was on the right track…sufficiently, at any rate, for her not to have to spell out her own thinking, which was bound to be afflicted by a measure of uncertainty. Instead, she cut to the chase. “The bond between Rowland and Magdalen was too tight,” she said. “I hadn't anticipated that the other circumstances of their planning would affect that. I thought that they'd be much like other pairs of non-identical twins. If anything, I thought the fact that they had different fathers would inhibit their closeness rather than intensifying it. I was wrong.”

“I don't think you made any mistakes,” I said, quite sincerely. “Nothing culpable, at any rate. There are some things that can't be anticipated. There's always a random factor. The fact that Rowland and Magdalen became as close as they did, and that their closeness worked out in the way that it did, wasn't something you could have anticipated and taken action to prevent. It was just an accident of happenstance.”

She didn't bother to thank me for my concern. “What I wish now,” she said, “is that they'd been able to follow through—if they'd just got on with it. This is the twenty-second century, damn it. We don't need to be afraid of incest any more. Stupid taboos of that sort can be set aside, now that there's no genetic peril involved. Once she'd decided that she couldn't have you, or anybody else, because of Rowland—however silly that decision was—Magdalen should have had Rowland. Separation, in those circumstances, turned out to be the worst of all worlds. I did urge her to contact you, Peter—and to keep in contact with Rowland too. She did that, after a fashion, but obviously not with any substantial result. I really did do everything I could, Peter—and I need you to make that clear to Rowland. I didn't forbid anything, and I didn't compel anything. All I wanted was for Magadalen—for both of them—to be safe and sane.”

She was no longer the perfect model of control she had been when she had summoned me to the Pyramid to receive my orders. I was on board now, doing what she wanted me to do—but she no longer seemed entirely certain what that was, or exactly how I ought to go about it. It was almost as if she were in search of reassurance. Some men might have put out a reassuring hand, and laid it lightly on her wrist, but I was my father's son, shaped to follow in his footsteps as a scientist, just as Rowland and Magdalen had been shaped to follow in Rosalind's. After Rowland, she had not had any more sons, and I knew why.

“I'll do what I can,” I promised. “If there's anything I can do to help repair your relationship with Rowland, I'll do it—for his sake. I know that you and I seemed to be on opposite sides, ten years ago, but that was just a by-product of the situation. I don't know what to say to him about Magdalen, though—I don't know what happened, or how, or why.”

She pulled herself together then, and fixed me with her artificial stare. “The exact details don't matter,” she said. “I suspect Rowland knows more than I do, although I can't be sure. If he wants to know whether I was treating her, yes I was—but not in any drastic way. I prescribed her mild euphorics, nothing more.”

“Aether?” I queried. It seemed a natural enough enquiry.

“No,” she said, sharply. “I never prescribed Aether.”

Not a Hive product
, I thought.
The brainchild of someone else's genius
.

“Some of the stuff I persuaded her to take wasn't even real,” Rosalind added. “I was hoping for a placebo effect. Love, or lust, or whatever is mostly illusion—if there's one thing in the world that the placebo effect ought to be able to demolish, it's the kind of sickness Magdalen had…but nothing worked. Illusory or not, her trouble was stronger than my ingenuity. Whatever you might have read in the yellow fraction of the web, I'm not really making rapid progress in mind control, with the aid of
fleurs du mal
, and if I were, I certainly wouldn't be testing them on my daughter. I tried to make her feel better—that's all. I failed.”

I believed her. Perhaps she regretted, now, that she hadn't tried anything more drastic, but I was prepared to believe that even Rosalind would have taken a gentle and discreet approach to her daughter's unhappiness. Her failure to help must have cut her to the quick; she wasn't used to failure.

“I didn't know whether the treatment would help,” she said, “but I was sure that it wouldn't do any harm. I thought it would at least stave off disaster. I really didn't expect to find her dead. If anything, I'd have expected….”

She didn't finish that sentence. At a guess, she'd been about to say that she'd have expected the first and only suicide in the family to be Rowland's, if there were ever to be any at all.

“I'm sorry,” I said, offering my condolences for the fact that Rosalind had not only failed to save her daughter, even by means of subtle trickery, but had been the one to find her dead. I didn't know what else to say. I didn't know that there was anything else I could say.

If I'd had to offer my own hypothesis about Magdalen's suicide I would have guessed that Magdalen had committed suicide because of a sense of desolation that she couldn't shake off by any means, including Rosalind's pychotropics and placebos. She had felt that sense of desolation, I estimated, because she couldn't be with Rowland, but felt that that she couldn't be with anyone else either, because of Roland, and had felt, in the end, that she couldn't bear to be alone either. Sometimes, sisterhood isn't enough, no matter how highly developed it might be. Guessing all that and knowing it, however, were two different things. I hadn't seen or spoken to Magdalen in years. What did I know? Wasn't I just projecting from what I'd observed when we were all a good deal younger? Perhaps Magdalen had changed in the interim. I hadn't, but perhaps she had. I didn't have any right to offer hypotheses to Rosalind—so I kept quiet. I just kept quiet.

A few moments ago, I'd been surprised that Rosalind had suddenly seemed human, for once in her life. Now, she seemed very human indeed—more so than me, in fact. I felt profoundly uncomfortable.

“I need to know that Rowland's all right,” she said. “He doesn't have to talk to me, if he doesn't want to, but I need to know that he's all right. He's my son.”

I could have told her, yet again, that I would do what I could, but she already knew that, and the promise was effectively empty while neither of us knew what I might be able to do. I couldn't believe, any longer, that she was here in order that I could be more fully informed when I had to answer Rowland's questions. She was in search of something else, and probably didn't know what it was. Neither did I.

She didn't say anything more, though. She looked at me, still probing for an opportunity to meet my eyes. It was my turn; she wanted me to take the conversational initiative—but I had no idea what to say. I glanced out of the window, noting that the setting sun was now to the left of the car's course and deducing that we had turned northwards, somewhere in the rural wilds of western Surrey or eastern Hampshire, but the dusk seemed gloomier than usual because of the tinted windows and the landscape was too vague to allow precise identification.

Rosalind took the glance, and my consequent expression, as a hint. She switched on the light. Her brass-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes seemed to flare up and intensify their beauty. Rowland, who had rarely descended so far as to refer to his mother as “the Queen Bee,” had sometimes referred to her, just between the two of us, as Ayesha—knowing that I could and would translate that as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.

She was still waiting for me to talk. Wherever the car was, it wasn't skirting the runways at Heathrow. Eventually, I talked.

“My father was a scientist through and through,” I said. “A physicist, like his father before him, not a namby-pamby biologist. A
solid-state
physicist…and in person, a man of very solid state. He'd probably heard the name Shelley, but he'd never read a poem in his life, and probably wouldn't have been able to grasp its meaning if he had. He named me in all innocence.”

That broke through her mental blockade efficiently enough. She had little alternative but to raise her stately eyebrows and say: “What on earth are you talking about?”