Nature's Shift (10 page)

“Absolutely,” Rowland confirmed. “I'll give you the whole story later, when we have a little more time.”

I nodded my head, having become momentarily incapable of speech. Enclosed within Rowland Usher's self-designed, self-constructed and self-maintained house, all those old dreams of our student days had suddenly come flooding back into my mind—all the projects that had gripped our collaborative imaginations before we had even started our careers, but which I had left behind in the interim. Obviously, he had been truer to his imagination than I had been to mine. I felt ashamed—and momentarily, I felt a twinge of envy. How had I slipped so far back, I wondered, while Rowland had continued to go forward? We had, after all, both been in love with Magdalen. How could it be, I wondered, that I had been existentially crippled by my unrequited love, as Magdalen seemed to have been by hers, while Rowland…?

The shame suppressed the envy, though, and I shunted the train of thought into a dead-end siding—as I seemed to have been doing with so many trains of thought since going through the gates of Eden once again, to re-entangle myself with temptation.

CHAPTER NINE

Because it was still not long after midday, in terms of local time, Rowland insisted on giving me a guided tour of the house once we had rested briefly in the study and I had assured him that I was not significantly jet-lagged. As I began to explore the remarkable house that Rowland had built for himself, conducted by the architect in person, I couldn't help falling ever further into submission to our old flights of fancy, and the more I saw, the more cause I had to wonder about how much progress his genius had made while mine had been plodding.

The castles in the air that I had built my college days had been, without exception, edifices of considerable beauty and profound charm, perhaps not so very unlike Rosalind's Crystal Palaces, although designed for human occupation rather than the accommodation of flowers. Rowland's imagination had always had a greater originality and wildness about it, which some might have called surreal and others Gothic, although I always thought of it as simply Romantic, in spite of Rowland's distaste for that appellation.

No one could say that the strange masterpiece that Rowland had elevated from the silt of the great swamp bore any resemblance to a Crystal Palace, but it had an elegance of its own as well as an awesome complexity. Rowland had referred to its internal layout as a labyrinth, and so it seemed to be, but it was far more than any mere exercise in enigmatic convolution.

The internal walls seemed slightly less than solid, but not because they resembled a supercooled liquid. They had a superficial texture not unlike soft flesh, and gave the impression that they might be capable of a certain sluggish protoplasmic flow. I have to admit that this suggestion gave me an uneasy feeling when Rowland took me down into the regions beneath the “residential floor”—the “bowels,” as I immediately began to think of them—and recalled to my mind the legend of Jonah who had been swallowed by a “great fish,” or, as the writer presumably meant to imply, a whale.

Commencing the tour seemed to fill Rowland with a new enthusiasm, and I was thankful that the awkward conversation about Magdalen's death was now out of the way. He was obviously eager to show me the house, and to have someone whose opinion he valued to witness his triumphs. He guided me through the spiraling smooth-walled corridor that curved eccentrically around the internal “organs” of the house, its several branches giving it the appearance that it might extend for miles, and he showed me the principal lateral corridors that connected the spirals, like the chemical bonds in some crazy parody of the DNA double helix. All the corridors were softly lighted by artificial bioluminescence, which was slightly too ruddy and subdued for my taste, but not unsuited to their apparent fleshiness. They were not exactly cool, and the air was surprisingly humid, but the temperature was not too high to be uncomfortable, and I was only sweating moderately.

Perhaps it was only because of his enthusiasm, and a lack of practice in sustained conversation, that Rowland's voice began to stumble as he pointed out the features of his dwelling, occasionally stuttering over simple sentences. He gave the impression, however, of being slightly intoxicated—although I was certain that he had only drunk water down on the quay and up in the study. I felt obliged to suggest that he might be too tired to give me the extensive tour he had planned and promised, and reminded him that we had all the time in the world to complete it on another occasion.

“You really don't need to worry,” he assured me. “As I told you, I might have been overdoing things slightly. You're right about the tour, of course—there's far too much to see in one excursion—but we do need to go a little further, so that you're familiar with the basic layout. It will do me good to walk and talk for a while—although I can't leave my work for very long, I fear, and I'll have to leave you to your own devices soon enough. It's as well that you know where things are as soon as possible, so that you can find your own way around.”

A sudden suspicion occurred to me, and I couldn't help voicing it. “You've been taking something while you put in long stints of work, haven't you? Not your mother's products, I assume, but chemical stimulants of some kind? Aether, perhaps?”

“The demands of the work leave me little choice,” he told me, unrepentantly. “Sometimes, I need a little assistance to keep going. Yes, I take Aether. There's no problem—I know my practical neurology, just as you do. The compound's safer than its predecessors, and much safer than the cocaine that made Venezuela what it was before the bottom fell out of the market. I'm careful.”

He did know all there had been to know about practical neurology ten years before, thanks to Professor Fliegmann, and I had no doubt that he was keeping closer tabs on current developments in all the branches of psychotropics than I was, but I wasn't convinced that the Rowland Usher I knew was capable of being
careful
. “Nothing that interferes with your neurotransmitters can ever be entirely safe,” I said.

“Don't be sanctimonious,” he retorted. “You did Fliegmann's course too—you took part in the experiments we undertook in consequence, and it certainly wasn't always you who got the placebo.”

“That was different,” I said.

“Was it? Just normal student folly, to be put away with other childish things? You know that it was more serious than that.”

Our psychotropic experiments had certainly seemed more serious, at the time; but it
had
been just normal student folly—perhaps not so very foolish, though, given that we had made every attempt to inform ourselves, academically, as to the risks associated with playing games with “the old tumor.” I didn't make the point aloud, though: I just stared at Rowland with what must have been an anxious expression.

“Oh, don't look at me like that,” Rowland said. “I just need to boost my energy occasionally, when fatigue makes work difficult. I haven't taken anything at all today, in honor of your arrival—perhaps that's where I went wrong. Yes, the old tumor's a little out of sorts at the moment—but I'm not suffering withdrawal symptoms any more than I'm under the influence. I haven't become any sort of addict while I've been living in the wilds. I'll be all right in a minute—
please
don't worry”

He seemed determined to fulfill his prophecy, and by the time the minute was up, he seemed to have succeeded.

“Let's go,” he said, his voice becoming firmer again.

So we went on—to the storehouses where the equipment he had ordered for my laboratory had been placed. I was briefly distracted by the task of checking the crates. Once we had done that, and taken a swift glance into some of the other storage-bunkers, I was able to admire the network of bioelectrical generators that fueled the air-conditioning, the elevators and the communication system.

Having briefly inspected the generating apparatus and the water-purification and waste-disposal apparatus—although very little of the latter was actually visible—we returned to the elevator in order to go up to the white-button region, where my as-yet-unequipped laboratory space was located, along with a number of chambers that seemed, in essence, to be miniature and opaque equivalents of Rosalind's showcases. They were filled with glass compartments containing specimens of various sorts. There were a few flowering plants, but the great majority of the glass cages contained insects in various stages of their development.

Here, at least, Rowland was able to pause, and lean against one of the cabinets, while I wandered around on my own tour of inspection.

The mature insects weren't particularly exotic, for the most part; they included beetles, moths and a few flies, but no bees. Without exception, however, they were unusually large—sometimes very large. The larvae and pupae were even larger, suggesting that future adults might be larger still…if they could survive the final phase of metamorphosis.

“I see that your experiments with induced giantism have gone way beyond the size of the conventional larval borers used in construction,” I remarked. “How are you coping with the traditional biomechanical difficulties and problems with oxygen distribution to the tissues?”

“The difficulties aren't as extreme as you might think,” he said, dismissively, adapting his tone to his negligent pose. “When insects first evolved, more than a hundred million years ago, they soon produced forms much larger than the ones Mother Nature produces today. The gene for producing hemoglobin is still included in the genomes of many insect species, and so are relics of the old control genes that organized and facilitated its distribution and circulation within larger bodies. The insects we know from Mother Nature's recent work are all exoskeletal specialists, but there's no reason why insectile chitin can't be adapted to endoskeletal structures of various kinds, to facilitate mechanical organization. Organizing the control genes isn't easy, of course, even with vertebrate models for reference, because the metamorphic phase introduces an extra level of complexity—but that has advantages as well as creating difficulties. It's not the kind of genetic engineering that we learned at Imperial, but it's a linear extension of the work that Roderick did in later life—in a very different direction from the one in which Rosalind elected to develop his work. She was always more interested in the flowers than the pollinators…nor that I read any crude sexist lesson into that, of course.”

I looked at him a trifle skeptically, for more than one reason. All I said, though, picking on the most innocuous factor in his speech was “You're trying to produce insects with backbones? Insects with hearts and veins? Why?”

“Why?” he echoed. “That's not a question you'd have asked ten years ago, Peter. Because Mother Nature didn't, and maybe I can. To say that she, like Rosalind, was more interested in the flowers would be putting the cart before the horse—and I certainly wouldn't want to get tangled up in silly mythological metaphors about Father Sky and Mother Earth—but what insects actually became, in the course of that chapter of the evolutionary story, was very heavily influenced by the rapid parallel evolution of the angiosperms. If the insects hadn't found all those new niches opening up, and committed so many of their species to symbiotic dependency on plant sexuality, the big picture might have worked out very differently.

“Primitive insects had the potential to produce descendants with far more of the characteristics we associate with vertebrates—but the vertebrates had got there first, albeit hesitantly. Thanks to the legacy thy inherited from the fish in the sea they invaded the land with lots of evolutionary scope and momentum already in hand. The insects took the road of least resistance—which is the road that natural selection always takes. Clever genetic engineering allows us to go back in time now, in a manner of speaking, with a view to expanding the insects' early genetic potential in ways that natural selection never found profitable. Why? Just
because
. What other motive do I need? Giantism might be the most obvious aspect of it, but it's far from being the only one—there's much more. ”

I cast my eye around the room we were in. “
Much
more,” I repeated. “You mean, in other rooms than this?”

He did, but he also seemed to think that he had done enough, for the time being. “There's lots to talk about in that regard, when we have the time,” he told me. “There are a lot of gleams in my paternal eye…but you're right that there's not much more to see in here but huge larvae, bloated beetles and pupae that aren't able to produce live imagoes. Sometimes, I get ahead of myself, seeing far more potential in my achievements than I've actually contrived to accomplish. You know how it is—you remember how it
was
, when we were students. Don't tell me that you aren't playing God-games with your algae, without ever bothering to ask yourself
why?
”

I did remember, and knew that I was guilty as charged, with respect to the algae—and I couldn't help feeling a slight thrill at the idea that, in entering the room, I'd stepped back in time, by ten years as well as a hundred million. This was, indeed, the kind of work we had dreamed of doing, back then—and if we had asked ourselves why, in those days, we would indeed have been perfectly satisfied to answer:
Just because
.” Beating Mother Nature at her own game had always seemed reason enough.

“Yes,” I confirmed, “I do know how it is, and I'm remembering more of how it
was
with every passing moment. I'm sure that we will have a lot to talk about, and not just about giant beetles and genuine dragonflies—although I doubt that my algae can compete in terms of glamour.”

Rowland seemed pleased by this response, and he led me back into the corridors with the evident intention of moving on to the next phase of his conducted tour—but his enthusiasm, or at least his energy, seemed suddenly to weaken again. This time, he gave in.

“That's enough for now,” he said. “It's almost dinner time anyway.” He changed direction and led me to an elevator—not the same one that we had used before, although it had the same triangular array of buttons.

We went back up to the floor where the bedrooms and the study were located, where there was also a dining-room.

“Half an hour,” he said, before disappearing into his bedroom.

I had plenty to do in the interim, and when I made my way back to the dining-room, once the thirty minutes had elapsed, I found the table set for four and Rowland already seated. Adam and Eve had evidently been busy preparing food, but had not anticipated that we would appear quite so soon; Rowland and I sat for a further fifteen minutes, conscientiously talking about nothing in particular, until the others joined us, bringing a tureen of soup with them.

The soup was anonymous, compounded out of vegetables and fungi—and possibly algae too—that were no longer identifiable, but it wasn't unpleasant. It was followed by a fillet of some kind of fish, accompanied by small potatoes and assorted green vegetables; I didn't recognize the species of the fish, but the taste was better than tolerable.