Nature's Shift (12 page)

So, at least, Rowland Usher saw the situation, if his jargon could be trusted.

Perhaps, I thought, it wasn't entirely surprising that Rowland saw the situation differently from his mother and his sisters—but there was nothing simple or straightforward about that situation, literally or metaphorically. Rosalind wasn't really a Queen Bee and Magdalen had never been a shrinking violet. Evolution might be progressive, and it certainly had a beauty about it, but it was irredeemably, horribly messy. Order and grandeur eventually emerged out of the chaos, but they were direly hard-won.

Thus far, genetic engineering, in spite of all its fabulous triumphs—like selective breeding before it—had only made marginal improvements on the fundamental messiness of natural selection. We were still novices at the God-game, having made a fairly conspicuous dent in the economics of death, at the levels of our own individuality and the unnatural selection of other species, but not yet having mastered the economics of sex, even in terms of the design of new species, let alone at the level of our own individuality.

In purely physical terms, of course, we now had sufficient control over our own reproduction to permit men like Peter Bell the First to revert to the stagnancy of asexual reproduction, and women like Rosalind Usher to pick and choose the sperm that would fertilize her eggs in order to produce daughters by the score—and sons too, had she wished—but physical terms were not the whole of the problem, and mere versatility in physical terms could not be counted as its solution.

At that point in my train of thought, not unnaturally, the personal took over from the intellectual—always a danger when one is tired, especially if one actually goes to sleep and dream-logic takes up the reins of argument. Fortunately, I rarely retain more than the vaguest fleeing memory of my dreams when I awake again, and although I'm sure that my reflections on the evolution of insects and flowers and their complex economic transactions produced some nightmarish imagery, once they metamorphosed into dreams and lost the control of rationality, I retained no clear picture of that imagery once reason resumed its empire.

Did I see Magdalen, Rosalind and Rowland in those dreams? Very probably. Did I see monstrous giant insects of various kinds? Almost certainly. Did I see flowers magnified in their gorgeousness and sexuality? Quite possibly. Did I see myself? Surely not. Even when I am manifestly present in my own dreams—and I often do not seem to be “there” are at all—I never
see
myself. There are no mirrors in my dreams. I have no idea how rare or common that might be.

At any rate, I cannot report on the remainder of the journey traveled by that particular train of thought, if it did continue after I fell asleep, because I cannot remember where it went. Like Rosalind's olfactory psychotropics, its effects, if any, were beyond the reach of consciousness.

Does it matter? At the time, I thought not—but as you will doubtless have realized by now, much of what I thought at the time eventually turned out to be misguided. Perhaps, if I had remembered my dreams as well as my stubbornly rational, seemingly-scientific chains of logic, I would have realized sooner what actually lay behind Magdalen Usher's untimely death.

It wouldn't have made any difference, though. There was nothing I could have done, no matter how much I had realized, any more than there had been anything Rosalind could do, or Rowland, or Magdalen herself. It was a Romantic tragedy, inescapable and unstoppable, at least by our science.

At least Rosalind and Rowland tried—and if people like us do not try, what hope is there that anyone will ever succeed?

CHAPTER TEN

When I did wake up, I lay silently in my bed for some time. I had closed the shutters over the window before going to bed, simply by turning a switch that had caused them to come together like eyelids, so the room was dark—but not entirely dark, for there was a slight residual bioluminescence in the walls: a sort of integral night-light. When I opened my eyes, unhurriedly, I continued to lie still. I thought that I could perceive a vibration in the dull, warm walls. I wondered briefly whether it might be the echo of something external, like heavy rain. I was in the tropics, after all, and although the storm promised by Adam's equivalent of the Met Office wasn't due until the following day, it might well be raining. I decided, however, that the faint sensation was more likely to be due to some mysterious internal process at work within the living fabric of the fabulous structure. After a time, I found it strangely comforting, as if it were a subliminal lullaby, but I resisted the temptation to drift back into peaceful sleep. There was work to be done, and I was anticipating a long and busy day.

I made my way to the dining-room without making any advance inquiry or notifying anyone of my intention, but I found Rowland there, and we breakfasted together. He seemed less pale than he had the day before, in spite of the fact that he must have worked long into the night; if his condition the day before had been an effect of abandoning the use of some psychotropic substance with which he had been experimenting, he had now overcome the slight withdrawal symptoms—one way or another. He told me, however, that he didn't have time to continue the guided tour of the house that he had begun the previous afternoon.

“My own work still requires my presence,” he explained, “but you'll want to set up your own lab anyhow. Adam will help you, but without a knowledgeable assistant of your own you'll find that it's a slow process—he's willing, but not expert.”

“There's no rush,” I said. “I won't be able to start collecting specimens until the day after tomorrow at the earliest, if there's going to be a storm, and for at least a fortnight, I won't be doing anything but observing and sorting. All I'll need, for quite some time, is an abundant supply of tanks and microscopic apparatus. I'll set up the sequencers and the vector cultures, of course, but I doubt that I'll being dong any genomic analysis for a week or the days, let alone any tinkering.”

“I have some efficient vectors for use in plants,” Rowland told me. “Some of them might be effective in algal cells, or easily adaptable to that purpose. I'll bring you some samples when I have time.”

He didn't bring them that day, which I spent organizing my laboratory in a careful and painstaking fashion. Adam was with me all the time, and proved to be more helpful than Rowland had led me to expect. Not only was the Venezuelan quick on the uptake in realizing what we were aiming to do, but he was curious about the equipment. I was surprised by his apparent unfamiliarity with instruments of which Rowland must make routine use, but I quickly realized that he had never been in Rowland's laboratory.

I had hoped to seek some enlightenment from Adam as to what ultimate aim Rowland might have in mind in experimenting with insect giantism, but soon concluded that he would not be able to tell me anything useful. Indeed, the boot was soon switched to the other foot, as Adam sought enlightenment from me, not only about what Rowland might be doing, but what I proposed to do.

I tried to explain, but it was hard work; Rowland had not bothered to provide him with the most elementary education in genetics—indeed, had probably deliberately refrained from so doing—and although Adam's English was perfectly viable for everyday communication, he simply did not have the vocabulary to cope with biological science. It took me several hours to explain to him where algae fit into Mother Nature's scheme of things, and why they were significantly different from plants, properly speaking. Almost as soon as I had my microscope set up he wanted to look through it, to see for himself why algal cells were not like plant-cells. He seemed fascinated by the fine structure of cells, but he had some way to go before he would be able to comprehend the mysteries of DNA.

He seemed disappointed that neither Rowland or I seemed to be interested in fish, which he regarded as a significant potential resource, but he seemed to approve of the fact that I was at least interested in species that provided fodder for fish. He didn't understand why anyone should be interested in insects, except to kill those that bit or stung, and the prospect of breeding giants of the kind lay far beyond the limits of his notion of sanity. Nevertheless, Adam evidently had an enormous respect for Rowland and was obviously very conscious of owing him a huge debt of gratitude. He and Eve could probably have contrived to make a living in their homeland without his patronage, but they would have had to take up residence in a city or labor on a plantation of a very different kind from Rowland's flamboyant grafting enterprise. Eventually, I began to understand what Rowland had meant when he said that Adam and Eve weren't entirely sure whether they were living in Heaven or Hell, although it might have been more apt to say that they did not know whether they were living in a palace in God's Eden or the Devil's.

Either way, Adam seemed content, and I imagined that Eve was too. They didn't seem to have experienced any temptation that might have prompted them to leave, or led to their expulsion.

I tried, as best I could, to enhance Rowland's seemingly divine attributes and dismiss the apparently diabolical ones out of hand. I told Adam about Roderick, and how his work on specialist pollinators had complemented the wholesale development of new primary producers to feed renascent humankind. Such was the ineptitude of my oversimplified explanations, however, that I suspect that the poor fellow took away the inference that Rowland was trying to produce bigger insects in order to service bigger flowers, and thus produce bigger fruits and seeds. I had to be content to let him think that I was trying to manipulate algae merely in order to produce better food for fish and to obliterate toxic algal blooms—of which he had some experience.

By the time we finished work for the day and went to meet Rowland for dinner, I had almost begun to wonder whether Adam might be right, and had begun to ask myself why I wasn't directing my efforts as an engineer toward the production of more useful crop-species, and species that might enhance the eventual revival of the marine ecosystems whose injuries we had not yet been able to assess in full. The world in which I was living was, however, replete with pedestrian kelp-men and would-be fish farmers, and there seemed to be room enough in it for researchers interested in more fundamental and more esoteric questions.

The main course at dinner was, as promised, centered on a joint of tissue-cultured beef, but it hadn't been cultured in the house. It had come from the freezer, having been imported from Brazil.

Roderick apologized yet again for not having had time during the day to show me more of the wonders of his residence, and told me that he was now too tired to begin repairing the omission that evening. He seemed slightly triumphant in reporting his tiredness, as if it somehow proved that my anxieties of the previous day regarding the use of stimulants had been misplaced.

He offered, instead of continuing the tour, to spend the evening with me in comfortable relaxation, and to make good on the promise he'd made earlier by filling in some of the detail of the researches that had led to the construction of the edifice—which, he claimed, would form an important component of his intellectual legacy, when he got around to publishing an account of them.

Naturally, I agreed. The two of us settled down in the study after coffee, with a decanter of some sort of home-made wine. It wasn't the produce of the legendary “noble grape,” but it had a perfectly tolerable taste.

Outside, the evening was becoming calm again, after a blustery day, and the sky was bright blue, gradually darkening as the sun set—but Rowland told me that it was definitely the proverbial calm before the storm, and that the situation would change dramatically overnight. “We'll be snug here, though,” he assured me.

“As bugs in a rug?” I suggested—but couldn't raise a smile from the insect man.

“You doubtless recall from discussions we had more than a decade ago,” he said, switching into a conscientiously earnest mode, “that I was always impatient with the traditional gantzing techniques that were in common use in our youth, which we were expected to learn in a more-or-less slavish fashion in the course we took in civil engineering.”

“I do,” I confirmed, with a wry smile.

“One of my chief interests then—which we shared, as you've already remarked—was the necessity of integrating better artificial living systems into the structure of buildings. Although biotechnologists had already developed methods of artificial photosynthesis, they had few advantages over natural systems, and I knew that truly sophisticated living dwellings wouldn't come into being until artificial photosynthesis had been considerably improved, which might well require thirty of fifty years. It seemed to me that the problem was better approached in the meantime by modifying living material for structural purposes rather than trying to add artificial life to structures formed by gantzing cementation. Roderick had already begun adapting architectural bacteria to work with supercooled liquids, but that seemed a very limited field.”

“Rosalind's done some good work along those lines,” I put in. “Have you seen pictures of the marquee she designed for the funeral?”

“Yes I have,” he said, curtly, “but as I say, that's not really relevant to what I've done. I started off trying to work with woody structures, perhaps under Professor Crowthorne's influence, but I soon figured out that I needed to retreat further down the evolutionary tree.”

“To fungi?” I asked, knowing already that he didn't mean algae.

“Fundamentally, yes—but that entire subphylum suffers some crucial and awkward limitations. I figured that fungal chitin might be a useful basic matrix, but I knew that photosynthetic systems would have to be integrated into it at some stage, and figured that it would also be profitable to import some animal systems too.”

“Hybridization of plant and animal tissue is hellishly difficult,” I observed. “Many have tried, but few have succeeded.”

“I didn't even try,” Rowland admitted. “Hybridization didn't seem to be the way to go. Not surprisingly, I figured that there might be a lot more scope in symbiosis. Rather than trying to design an edifice that was akin to a gigantic organism, it seemed to me that it might be better to devise one that was akin to a colony: a colony combining fungal and cnidarian flesh with molluskan and insect flesh, to combine the benefits of animal and fungal chitin with those of shell and coral.”

I was genuinely impressed. “Chimerization rather than hybridization,” I said. “There's a lot of interesting work going on in that line back home—but nothing as ambitious as the kind of hectic mix you're talking about. Have you really brought that off?” I looked around at the walls of the room with new respect, not having suspected them of so much internal complexity, at the protoplasmic level.

“This part of the house is relatively simple,” he told me, following the direction of my gaze. It isn't until you get down into the guts that the full extent of the…well, I suppose
chimerization
is as good a word as any…becomes obvious. What you're looking at now is mostly just gantz-enhanced chitin.”

I suddenly formed a mental picture of the buttons in the elevator, and realized the significance of the four black buttons at the base of the isosceles triangle.

“You mean that the edifice extends downwards as well as upwards?” I said. “It has an elaborate network of cellars?”

“I suppose that
cellars
,” he said, rather disdainfully, “is as good a word as any.” He was deliberately repeating the formula he'd used only a few moments before, but his tone implied that the descriptive capability of the word was distinctly lacking this time. He didn't suggest any alternative, though. He'd already used “labyrinth” with respect to the parts of the house I'd seen, and presumably didn't fee that “bowels” was any more appropriate than “cellars.” He'd already shown me the waterworks and sewerage, so the depths he was talking about now were deeper than that.

“As we discussed back in the old days,” Rowland went on, “houses will one day be living hybrids of all kinds of flesh, harvesting the energy of the sun as plants do, moving as animals do, and providing every internal facility that biology can offer—but that's a long way in the future. My house simulates a more primitive kind of organism: a lowly saprophyte and scavenger, which draws its energy from the organic detritus of the silt out of which its walls are constructed.

“She's no more sophisticated, in terms of her nutrition, than many sedentary creatures which live in shallow seas, filtering food from the murky waters which overflow them. Her closest analogues, if you wish to think in such terms, are polyps, barnacles and tubeworms. She's alive and growing, though, with a great deal to scope for further development. Her saprophytic activity provides energy for numerous internal processes relying on what you call chimerization, although it really is more akin to symbiosis, in that many—though not all—of her subsidiary elements are disconnected from the basic biomass, resembling free-living organisms rather than the kind of grafts represented by the plantations.

“The Orinoco feeds the house's appetites very well, with all manner of decayed vegetable matter washed out of Venezuela's heartland. It serves as a veritable cornucopia to the network of filters that extend from her foundations.”

“It's an impressive scheme,” I readily conceded. “I look forward to seeing more of the detail in action.”