Nature's Shift (18 page)

“That's right,” he said. “Sterile of course….not equipped, as yet, with any kind of reproductive apparatus. All workers, no queens…and no drones. In time, though…God got it backwards, of course, in
Genesis
. First you make your females, equipping them, in the first instance, for parthenogenetic reproduction…you only need males if and when you decide to add sex into the equation, to shuffle the genetic deck, and you only need to do that if and when you want your new human race to be capable of natural evolution, of finding its own future destiny.

“Honestly, do you think there'd be any point in that? Don't you think they might be happier if they don't have to get involved with all that crap? Don't you think they'll have a better chance at Utopia if they're all female? We have genetic engineering now, and directed evolution. We don't need Mother Nature's crazy makeshift any more…
they
won't, at any rate. They'll be much better off without it, don't you think? What has sex ever done for us…for you and me, I mean…except screw us over?”

“I think we might be exceptions to the rule,” I said, quietly. “Rosalind's son and Peter Bell the Second's clone…it was never going to be easy, was it, to adapt ourselves to that side of human life? But think of the beauty—the human beauty—we'd be missing, without sexual desire, sexual longing, unrequited love—and requited love too, for those fortunate enough….”

“The Romantic imagination,” Rowland said, even more scornfully than usual. “There
is
beauty, Peter, without the sublimation of the sex urge. There
is
an objective aesthetics. Insects might not know that consciously, and flowers certainly don't, but even so, they
are
beautiful. And you didn't answer the question. Even if we
are
exceptions to a general rule—and I think the rule might have far more exceptions than you suspect—what has sexual desire ever done for you and me, except cause us pain and make us miserable?”

“It didn't have to be that way,” I murmured.

“In a better world, Magdalen might have loved you back,” Rowland said, voicing the thought behind the thought, “and in the same better world, I might have loved someone else too. But
this
is the world we're in, Peter.
This
is the world we have to change…and if we can't change it by ourselves, as we probably can't, we have to prepare the way for those who will.

“Mother Nature fucked it up, Peter; the insects were trapped into slavish dependency on flowers, instead of going on, instead of exploring the potential rewards of metamorphosis to the full—but we can make a difference. You and I can make a difference. I want you to promise me that if anything does happen to me, you'll carry on. I want you to promise me that you'll be my heir—not for the sake of the millions, but for the sake of the future.”

“What about my algae?” I said.

It sounded stupid even to me. I could have told him that I didn't have his genius, his imagination, his sense of purpose, his artificial tumor, but I wasn't about to admit that I was anything less than he was. I had loved her too, at least as much as he had, at least as much as any other human being could have done. I had been bereft for a decade too, and now that she was dead, I knew that all hope—even illusory hope—was extinct. But all I could actually say, for the moment, was:
what about my algae?
What about
my
work?

“You can't let me down, Peter,” he said. “You mustn't—for Magdalen's sake.” A low blow, that one.

“I can't let you down because I'm never going to get the chance,” I told him, wondering that I could even form the syllables of such an outrageous lie. “You're going to live for another two hundred years…perhaps forever. We might be members of the first generation whose members don't have to die, Rowland—except, when they somehow come to wish it, by their own hands. We have all the time in the world.”

I really was tempting Fate in saying that—but the last thing in the world I expected Fate to do was take me at my word, with hardly a moment's delay. Even in the absence of solid-state physical causality, things sometimes come together. There's not only an objective beauty in the way of the world, but an objective irony too. Sometimes, when Mother Nature fucks things up, it's not an accident, whether we can see an explanation or not.

Rowland hadn't been consciously afraid, and he'd had good reasons not to be. He'd already told me that he could demolish the supplemental cell-network that he added to his cerebrum with a magic bullet—a virus tailored to destroy those cells and no others, by targeting a gene incorporated into them precisely to make them vulnerable—and do so at a moment's notice. To be quick on the draw, though, you have to be determined, and you have to be ready. You can't fire while you're in denial, obsessively telling yourself that you're all right, that you're going to live forever….

And you can't fire, either, if your real intention, conscious or unconscious, is to die. Roland had let go of his secret now, or as much of it as he was ever going to yield. He had made his will. Perhaps it was only the privileged custody of his secret, his refusal to see or speak to anyone but his innocent Adam and Eve, that had kept him alive for so long. Rosalind had, after all, expected him to die first. He was the one who had literally screwed up his brain; Magdalen had only received the placebo. He was the one who had rendered himself physically oversensitive to the effects of Aether; her vulnerability was purely psychological, beyond the reach of rational consciousness and natural science.

I could see all of that, in my mind's eyes, but none of it mattered, for the moment. What mattered was that Roland was no longer merely ill, but dying. Something in him had shattered or dissolved—not directly because of anything I'd said to him or he'd said to me, and perhaps not even directly because of Magdalen's death and the dire poison of regret that it had suddenly injected into him, but simply
because
….

Rowland suddenly began to cough, explosively, as if a gob of saliva had slipped into his windpipe while he was trying to swallow. I patted him to the back, then grabbed the glass of water from the side-table and tried to put it to his lips. The cough developed into a kind of seizure—by which time it was far too late to think about the Heimlich maneuver. That only works with solid objects, anyhow.

I reached out to him with both arms and tried to calm and comfort him—but blood spattered my right hand, and I realized that the seizure wasn't passing off, wasn't stopping. His face had a ghastly pallor, and he struggled to whisper.

“Magdalen!” he contrived to say, pronouncing her name in full, if not very clearly-enunciated. “I'm sorry….”

It was as if the words themselves asphyxiated him, although he wasn't actually choking. I tried to clear the non-existent blockage from his throat, in order to administer artificial respiration, but I couldn't start his heart beating again, once it had stopped.

Within minutes, he was dead.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I sat with the body for a couple of minutes, having no idea what to do next. I didn't call Adam and Eve. Eventually, I picked up my phone and did the only thing I could—not in the sense that it was the only thing that was theoretically possible, but in the sense that it was the only action of which I was capable, at the time. It was the only action that would let me off the hook.

I called Rosalind.

“It's Peter Bell the Third,” I told her answer-AI, although she would have knew that perfectly well, as my caller ID would be automatically displayed and she'd be able to see my face when she played back the message. “Rowland's dead. I'm sorry. He had some kind of fit—I think the proximal cause of death might be a cerebral hemorrhage, but it was probably brought on by an anomalous reaction to Aether, caused by some kind of somatic modification he made to his brain ten years ago. An autopsy will probably clarify the matter.”

She returned the call within two minutes. She didn't curse me. She hadn't even gone pale. It was almost as if she had been expecting it—as she probably almost had. She, after all, was probably the only one who knew exactly how Magdalen had died, and probably had her own secet ideas about exactly how the responsibility for her death had to be divided up.

“How long ago?” she asked.

“Five minutes…maybe ten, by now. No more than twenty.”

“I'll be there as soon as I can,” she said. “You'll have to connect the body to all the appropriate machinery, for the medical analyses, but I'll take care of the legal formalities
en route
. I'll seal this connection, but you'll have to put an access code into his system. Can you do that?”

“Yes,”

“Is he in bed?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You do have nanoprobe equipment and scanners on hand, don't you?
He
has, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Once the hook-ups are in place and I'm in control of his system, you can leave everything to me. It's about eight p.m. there now, yes?”

“Just after. That makes it midnight where you are?”

“Just after,” she confirmed. “It'll probably be late afternoon tomorrow, at the earliest, by the time I can get there, even though I'll gain four hours in flight—a long wait, I fear. Thanks for calling right away. You did the right thing.”

Mother Nature might have been able to match Rosalind for creativity, but she'd never had that kind of organizational flair.

I had to tell Adam and Eve what had happened in order to send Adam in search of the various medical apparatus needed to hook the body up to the house's systems and launch the automatic autopsy. Giving control of the house's systems to Rosalind was easier.

Adam and Eve took the news hard. Adam checked Rowland's body very carefully for signs of life, just in case, but found none.

Finding Eve's alarm and grief harder to bear than my own, I left her to sit with the body while the post-mortem examination was carried out, although I made sure that Adam was able to operate the scanner before leaving them to it.

I made my way back to the study first, where I sat at the terminal for a while, monitoring Rosalind's operations. She seemed to be handling “the legal formalities” with ruthless efficiency, but I didn't suppose she was doing it all personally. Rosalind knew how to delegate. The only thing I decanted for my own use was a three-dimensional map of the house, but I didn't put it to immediate use. I tucked it away for future reference. I did locate and check out Rowland's own copy of his last will and testament, which confirmed that I was now the owner of the House of Usher—or would be, once the will had gone through probate.

The will requested burial of the body beneath the house, and the subsequent recycling of its organic material by the house's systems. That wouldn't have been legal in England, but this was Venezuela, and a region of that crippled nation beyond the reach of any surviving law. I didn't suppose that Rosalind would be happy about it, but I decided that I would have to insist if she tried to object, because that was what Rowland would have wanted me to do—and I didn't want to start debating with myself, as yet, as to exactly how far I was or wasn't prepared to go in doing what he wanted me to do.

It was past eleven when I finally went back to Adam and Eve, to make sure that they knew that Rosalind was handling everything, and that they mustn't do anything but wait. Then I asked Adam to dim the house lights and returned to my own room. Midnight had gone by the time I got into bed, but my inner sense of time seemed to have become confused, and I didn't begin to feel tired until I actually made a conscious decision to go to sleep.

Then, fatigue suddenly swept over me like a wave. I wondered if that was how Rowland had felt in the wake of his brain-tempering. I wasn't tempted to go looking for his Aether supply, though. I wanted to go to sleep.

With darkness and fatigue, though, came an inevitable relaxation of reason, and when I did go to sleep, my self-control—so carefully maintained during the last few hours by the iron grip of determined consciousness—was banished. I dreamt more nightmarishly than I had done on any previous night of my life, and my dreams were pure Eddie Poe.

I dreamt that I buried Rowland not in his own house but in the other House of Usher—the haunted purgatory of Romantic fantasy. Our long journey to the grave was through rotting passages weeping with cold slime, lit only by smoky torches whose flames were angry red. I dragged his coffin behind me, supporting only one end, while the other slid through the worm-infested mud, crushing insect-larvae by the score. The larvae screamed, but very faintly. I imagined that Rowland's dead lips were speaking to me as we went, mocking my slowness.

“Trains of thought need tracks,” he told me. “Where are your tracks now, Peter? You'll never get to where you need to be at this rate.”

“For the love of God, Rowland!” I complained. I felt thirsty.

That was bad enough, but, after I had immured my one and only friend in a vault behind a great metal door, I remained anchored to the spot, listening for an eternity, waiting for the sounds that I knew would come—the sound of the body risen from its rest, its fingers tapping and scratching at the door, the sound of its heart, beating once again more powerfully than before.

Inevitably—probably, there was no real lapse of time, but simply an aching false consciousness of time passed—the sounds began. The heartbeat taunted my soul with echoes of dread and anguish, which reverberated in my being until I felt myself literally
driven
insane, and howled at myself in the fury of my hallucination: “Madman! Madman! Madman!”

Then I woke in a cold sweat, feeling exceedingly thirsty.

And I heard, outside the door of my chamber, a faint tapping and scratching.

For a moment, I convinced myself that I was still asleep, and struggled manfully to wake. Then I could deny my senses no longer, and knew that the sound was real.

I dragged myself from my bed, feeling very heavy, as if my body required an agony of effort in order to move at all. I stumbled to the door, and opened it, at first by the merest crack and then—in consequence of what I saw—much wider.

There in the faintly-lit corridor, prostrate at my feet, one hand still groping for the door, was what seemed to be a teenage girl.

I knew, of course, that she was not human. How many human genes were in her—Magdalen Usher's genes, taken from the tissue-cultures that had outlived their source—I could not guess, but I knew that she was a sham, a phantasm, no more human than the maggots that would soon consume Rowland Usher's body…and one day, no doubt, my own.

She didn't look like Magdalen, as I remembered my one and only true love from her teenage years. She didn't look fully or convincingly human, even in the dim light of the corridor. But she was, as Rowland had promised, beautiful. Hers was not the beauty of a butterfly, or a dragonfly, or a colored beetle; it was no kind of beauty that any species of insect had ever manifested before, and it was not, strictly speaking, human beauty—but she
was
beautiful, in a way of her own that seemed poignant and pathetic. She was the kind of creature, undoubtedly, that a human might love…if not, perhaps, a human like me. To me, she was a pitiful creature, and it was pity that moved me to respond to her presence. I remembered what Rowland had said about such creatures not living long

Some insect imagoes, I knew, emerge from their pupae without digestive systems, unable to nourish themselves; they exist only to exchange genes in the physiological ritual of sexual intercourse, and then to die. These creatures of Rowland's did not even have reproductive organs inside them…yet. They existed neither to eat nor to breed, being equipped only with the very minimum of a behavioral repertoire, in order to serve their maker's transitory purpose. That purpose still had a long way to go before it would be properly focused. For now, Rowland's race of New Eves existed purely and simply to assist him in the work of their continued improvement, the ambition of their ultimate perfection. For now, they were merely rough sketches of their ultimate descendants, with tiny random tumors in their unnecessarily voluminous chitinous skulls, which had not yet found the trick of becoming embryonic brains, let alone of actually thinking.

And yet, when I took the pitiful creature in my arms, she was able to cling to me and caress me, to soothe as well as to be soothed. That might have been the entirety of her emotional existence, but it was not negligible. Like a mayfly, she had been born with only a short time to live, innocent and ignorant of time, space and the world at large. Her universe was the House of Usher, and her journey of exploration along the spiral corridor had been the only one she would ever make.

I could only hope that she was passing her brief existence in a kind of bliss, and that I was helping to sustain that absence of terror, expectation and desire.

I was fully awake now, and although I had been startled and a little appalled, I was able to react in a rational manner. I picked the poor creature up and carried her to my bed, where I stroked her, gently

She died before morning.

When I had got dressed, I consulted the map I had decanted on to my handset, and carried her body down the caverns deep underground. They were, indeed, a long way down, but they were still within the living walls of the growing manse, in whose nooks and crannies the free-living maggots pupated.

Down there I saw rank after rank of grey pupae, shaped like the sarcophagi in which the Egyptians entombed their mummified dead. I watched the hatching of a few of the humanoid ephemerae, and studied the phases of their brief life-cycle by inspecting individuals of different ages.

They clustered around me—not driven by curiosity or the hope of caresses, in my judgment, but simply by some instinct of gregariousness. They probably could not tell that I was not one of them, in spite of my stature, age and sex. They had beautiful eyes—eyes, Rowland had told me, had been easy to fake—but they had no idea what they were seeing. They were not blind, but they were not conscious either, so the sensory information they collected either vanished into a void or deployed its effects at a far more basic level than consciousness, or even emotion.

They did not need me to stay with them—those aspects of Rowland's work that had demanded continual and relentless attention were concerned with their further evolution, not their mundane lives—but I did stay with them, for most of the morning. I found their presence comforting.

It was not until Rosalind called me and told me that her flight had landed, and that she was on her way to board a chartered boat, that I went back up to the top of the house, to see Adam and Eve. The three of us grieved for a while. Once the distant post-mortem had been completed, Eve had washed the body and replaced the unclean bedding. The body had been arranged in a resting position. Decay had not yet made measurable progress; that part of the house was sterile.

I read the autopsy results. Rowland had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, apparently occasioned by an anomalous interaction between Aether—the official report gave the full chemical name and formula rather than the familiar term—and a cluster of transformed cells in a localized area of the cerebrum.

The report did not say so, but I knew that the area in question was the one associated with rational and scientific thought…except, of course, that, like genes, brain-cells never do just
one thing
. You can't enhance one propensity without affecting others. Nature is the Mother of improvisation; there's always a trade-off on the road of least resistance, and even when you get what you wanted, you get screwed.

Adam asked me what would happen, now. He meant to him and Eve. I told him that I didn't know, yet—that I would have to talk to Rosalind before making any firm decisions—but that he need have no fear. For as long as he and Eve were prepared to tend to the house, they would be paid to do so. If they no longer wanted to do it, they would be given generous assistance to settle elsewhere.

Adam told me that he didn't want to leave the house. Eve agreed with him. It was their home, their refuge.

Adam and I went down to meet Rosalind's boat when it approached the harbor. She wasn't alone, of course; she had brought four men with her—all drones, I could not help thinking, although I knew that they wouldn't be idle, and I recognized one of them as her petty Saint Peter, who had let me in but wouldn't let me out again while manning the gates of Eden. She left the hirelings to follow orders without direct supervision, though, when she accompanied me to inspect the body of her only son. She didn't touch the body. She simply stood and looked at it, sorrowfully.

“You expected this,” I said, accusatively. “You knew something like this was going to happen.”

“No I didn't, Peter,” she said, flatly. “I feared that it might—but I sent you here in the hope that you might somehow be able to prevent it from happening. It's not your fault that you couldn't. If anyone is at fault, it's me, because I couldn't.”