Nature's Shift (7 page)

“There's a poem by Shelley called ‘Peter Bell the Third,' which is a parody of a poem by Wordsworth called ‘The Tale of Peter Bell.' Wordsworth's poem is about a potter who goes off the rails but is redeemed by an encounter with a supernatural ass—a literal donkey, not a metaphorical one. Wordsworth though it was a masterpiece, but other people—including Shelley—thought it was absurd. There's a possibility that Wordsworth might have had Shelley in mind when he wrote the poem, Shelley's initials being P. B., or, at least, that Shelley might have thought so. Shelley's reply is about a posthumous Peter Bell and his misadventures in Hell. It's quite amusing—unless your name happens, coincidentally, to be Peter Bell the Third, in which case the sarcasm takes on a considerably sharper edge, and one or two of the insults become decidedly offensive.”

Rosalind thought about that for a moment or two, and then said: “So you understand about the Usher thing, then?”

“Yes,” I said.

I did understand about “the Usher thing,” and why it might add measurably to the embarrassment, if not the tragedy, of two siblings tempted to incest, whether they resisted the temptation or not. That was what I was trying to get across to her.

She took my word for it, and nodded. “I thought it was harmless,” Rosalind told me. “After all, I didn't call Rowland Roderick, and I didn't call Magdalen Madeleine. I thought the faint echo was harmless—and I was always slightly disapproving of Daddy's effective rejection of the name, on what seemed to me to be silly grounds. I hadn't realized that you were similarly afflicted…but I suppose it's not that uncommon, given the sheer abundance of the English literary legacy. There can't be many people around whose names
haven't
been pre-echoed in some stupid story—and given the nature of stories, few of the echoes are likely to be flattering. We're not dealing with curses, though. There's no
causality
here.”

“No solid-state physical causality,” I agreed. “But you understand the placebo effect as well as anyone.”

Her blue eyes seemed actually to become brighter as that thrust struck home, and I realized that, for once in her life, Rosalind really wasn't in control. The blaze in her eyes was just an illusion, though.

I hadn't even meant what I'd said. It had just been wordplay. Eddie Poe had had no more effect on Magdalen than Percy Shelley had had on me. There was no metaphorical placebo effect in operation. There was no pseudocausal link at all in any echo there might have been in Magdalen Usher's fate to that of any imaginary predecessor, any more than there was any pseudocausal link between Percy Shelley's
jeu d'esprit
and any sensation I might ever have had, or still might have, that I was living in Hell and eternally damned. In both cases, it was purely and simply a matter of the effects of unrequited love—a cliché so old that it had been “pre-echoed” a million times over in life and literature alike.

I wondered whether Rosalind was really capable of understanding what had happened to Magdalen, given that she had probably never experienced unrequited love herself…unless you counted her love for Rowland in that category. Could I be certain, though, that she hadn't ever loved anyone in the utterly hopeless fashion that Magdalen had loved Rowland? Rosalind's life-story, as I knew it, gave the impression of someone who had never had the slightest romantic interest in anyone, but publicly-available life-stories can sometimes be deceptive, even when they seem to make sense. What did anyone actually know, after all, about the intimate life of Elizabeth I? And Rosalind did make sense. No matter what other criticisms could be leveled against her, she certainly made sense.

“You need to be careful,” Rosalind said to me, returning to the nub of the matter, “in what you say to Rowland, and how. I've told you what little I can about Magdalen's death, and—more importantly—I've told you what I don't know. I can guess, you can guess, and Rowland will guess too—but at the end of the day, we don't know. We never can and never will.”

That was true, in a strictly logical sense.

“I'll be careful,” I promised.

“If I thought I could do this myself, you know, I would,” she told me, unnecessarily. “If I thought one of his sisters…but such is the cruelty of circumstance that we could only make matters worse. You're the only one who can help him, if he does need help. The only person in the world.”

I wasn't at all sure that I
could
help, if Rowland really was in need of help, but I was fairly sure that I wouldn't make things worse—and I tended to agree with Rosalind that she, or any one of her many surviving daughters, might have made things worse, if they'd tried to force themselves upon him.

“I'll do my best,” I promised.

She was still looking at me, still studying me. Perhaps she had learned more from our brief encounter than I had. She'd never bothered to study me before, when I was only Rowland's friend, even though she knew by then how difficult Rowland found it to make friends.

“I do wish things had worked out differently,” she said, in a tone tinged with wonderment. She had always had such control over her life and surroundings that she had never been able to see herself as a victim of circumstances. Now she knew regret, as a burden and a poison. She had more than dozen other daughters, but that didn't reconcile her in the least to the fact that she no longer had Magdalen, and now had to live with the suspicion that if only she'd done things differently—if only she'd known what to do differently—things might have worked out differently.

“So do I,” I said, as blandly as I could.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I wouldn't have got much sleep in any case, knowing that I had to get up at five-thirty to check in on my room's web-console and then get over to the terminal in time to board. I would have been on edge even if I hadn't had that bizarre conversation with Rosalind in her blacked-out car, or even if we'd actually spelled out more of what we had to say rather than leaving so much to inference—but there are things that are difficult to say aloud, especially in an era that prides itself on its New Privacy. Although the conventions of the New Privacy had initially been designed as defenses against web leakage, they had inevitably spread their tentacles far and wide.

Eugenics is one of those things that, in the modern world, everybody likes to practice but nobody likes to talk about. It carries too much historical and literary baggage. Rosalind had probably been profoundly glad when I told her that I understood, without it being spelled out, why she had had no more sons after Rowland—and why, as a pre-corollary of the same concern—Roderick the Great had elected to leave his own heritage to a daughter, rather than a son.

Back in the twentieth century, when practical eugenics first became feasible, thanks to
in vitro
fertilization and the selection of eggs and sperms, even the word “eugenics” had been taboo, and nobody ever used it to describe what they were doing when people carrying seriously problematic genes made certain that the particular eggs and sperms employed to create their offspring were free of those hazards. It must have been obvious, even then, that as reproductive technologies continued to improve, and understanding of genetic potentials improved in tandem, the choices available would become increasingly complex. Even before the advent of the twenty-first century, there were sperm-donor banks in existence that selected for intelligence, athletic ability, musical talent and a score of other factors, to the rough-and-ready extent that it could then be done. And by that time, people had known for centuries, if only as an item of crude folk wisdom, that “genius” and “madness” were closely and strangely allied.

Strictly speaking, that isn't true—but when it did become possible to speak more strictly, to define more exactly what was going on in neurological terms when individuals had a natural aptitude for mathematics, painting or gymnastics, the alliance between the closeness and the strangeness only became more intricate and more challenging. It had then become possible to found a proper academic discipline of practical neurology, but the art had been in its infancy when Rowland and I had taken Professor Fliegmann's pioneering course at Imperial.

In themselves, of course, genes don't “cause” physical characteristics. What they do is make proteins. Even the “control genes” making proteins that determine when and where other genes are switched on in various specialized tissues don't cause anything in a crudely deterministic sense—but they do help to create propensities on which experience of the world, education and rigorous training can work. Innate talents and character defects still have to be nurtured or opposed, developed and shaped by culture and effort, but they do exist, and they don't materialize at random, even though the paths of facilitation are sometimes hard to detect. There are random factors involved, as there are in any complex system, but that doesn't affect the fact that there are fundamental patterns, which usually survive any amount of supplementary random noise.

Sometime around the end of the twentieth century, it was discovered that mathematical ability and the scientific mind-set were based in the enhanced activity of certain parts of the brain, and the particular patterns of initial neural connection present in those areas. The propensity in question begins development in the embryo, prior to birth, in response to a complex combination of factors, some directly genetic and some “indirectly genetic,” in the sense that the effect is hormonally mediated. One of the most significant phases in the chain of causality occurs in the seventh month of pregnancy, when hormonal releases in the body trigger the changes determining whether an individual embryo will manifest male or female secondary sexual characteristics. In the vast majority of cases, of course, the former are chromosomally XY and the latter XX, but there are exceptions and anomalies—and, of course, degrees of effect, even in the cases where the pattern is sustained.

Nobody was a hundred-per-cent sure, back at the dawn of the twenty-first century, whether “secondary sexual characteristics” included mental tendencies, although ninety-nine per cent of the people who took a guess figured that they did, and that the fact that almost all the mathematical and musical geniuses of the past had been male wasn't simply a reflection of the way that boys and girls had been brought up. Once the genes influencing brain development, both directly and indirectly, had been identified, and sophisticated technological control of the hormonal activity of embryos became possible, the possibility of selecting children for all kinds of talents and potentialities became possible.

In the short term, of course, it led to certain demographic distortions, much as the advent of sex-selection had initially led to a large preponderance of male births—but such distortions tend to be self-correcting, partly because shortages of supply lead to increases in perceived economic value, and partly because intense competition in producing particular results tends to highlight the hazards associated with such results. From an objective viewpoint, however, one couldn't say that a large number of parents wanting smarter and more scientifically-inclined children was a bad thing, given that the ecocatastrophe was already turning into the Crash. If ever the world had needed scientific geniuses by the score, that was the time. One might almost suspect the involvement of the hand of Providence, especially if you believe that it's the crafty kind of hand that never gives without taking something away…but I digress.

The first role of genetic engineering is that you can never do just one thing. Genes are multifunctional; you can't produce one result without producing others, and an attempted increase in one result inevitable leads to increases in the others, not necessarily in proportion. Something else people had known for centuries before the Crash, glimpsed through the clouded lens of crude folk wisdom, was that great mathematicians and scientists, and great musicians and artists, tended to pay a penalty for their exceptionality in terms of other facets of the personality. They were not “mad,” in the sense that they were subject to some kind of mental “illness,” but their minds tended to work in particular and peculiar ways that, if exaggerated, tended toward what was once called “autism.” Crudely put, born scientists were often potentially brilliant in terms of limited focus, but anything but brilliant when it came to functioning efficiently in a social environment. Some mathematical geniuses and brilliant painters were unable even to communicate with other people with any degree of comfort or efficacy.

For a while, it was thought that there might be single spectrum of bundled functions and dysfunctions, which began with “normal” female behavior and then extended through “normal” male behavior and various kinds of “genius” to the breakdown point of “autism,” but that inevitably turned out to be far too simple as a scheme of conceptual geometry. There was an axis of sorts there, but it was complicated by all kinds of extensions into other dimensions—far more than three of them. By the time sophisticated mapping of the propensities became possible, it required a clever AI or a highly unusual genius to get anywhere near a capacity to “visualize” its conceptual geometry—but it could be done, mathematically.

When Peter Bell the First and Roderick the Great decided that they wanted their children to be chips off the old block—scientists of very considerable ability, if not of genius—that kind of practical neurology was still in its relative infancy, but it could be done, to a reasonable level of approximation. Satisfaction was pretty much guaranteed, in the ability department, and the hazards could—in theory at least—be minimized. Where the acceptable minimum was located was, of course, a matter of opinion.

Peter Bell the First took the straightforward option, and decided that his son and heir ought to be a biological clone—which minimized some of the risks, but by no means all. The very making of that choice, however, illustrated the fact that he possessed one of the frequent corollaries of scientific genius that some people might regard as a dysfunction: he was subject to an intense feeling of superiority, which made him construe his failures to relate successfully to other human beings as a reflection of their incompetence rather than his. To sum the situation up with brutal simplicity, he was an arrogant son-of-a-bitch, who was very efficient in his vocation, and won awards for that reason, but whom nobody actually liked—including, as it turned out, and perhaps especially, his own clone, Peter Bell the Second.

Roderick the Great was a subtler thinker by far than Peter Bell the First. He had observed the difficulties that often afflicted great scientists in relationships with other human beings, including their own children, and had taken due note of the number of sons of scientists who deliberately chose to direct their efforts in a direction entirely different to the ones their fathers had taken, sometimes refusing to extend their intellectual potential at all. Perhaps because he was a biologist, and not a physical scientist, Roderick made a far more intensive study of practical neurology
per se
, and came up with the theory that that a male scientist who wanted a reliable heir would do far better to have a female child, who might be unlikely to exhibit the desirable qualities of scientific genius to quite the same degree as a male, but would also be far less likely to suffer the consequences of the undesirable ones. Hence Rosalind, who did not hate Roderick as Peter Bell the Second had hated Peter Bell the First, but loved him very dearly, and did indeed set out to carry forward his intellectual dynasty exactly as he would have wished.

Way beyond the effects of genetics, there is a momentum in such multigenerational processes, of which Rosalind was a beneficiary—and how! The rise of the new house of Usher not only continued, but accelerated, and became unstoppable. That was one in the eye for Eddie Poe—who had, of course, been innocent of any malicious intent in plucking a name out of the air to bestow upon the luckless protagonist of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” On the other hand, it wasn't entirely obvious that Rosalind had entirely avoided the pitfalls so often associated with male scientific genius.

And so to the second generation.

Peter Bell the Second's hatred of his father did not take the form of differentiation, as it might easily have done, but of competition. He did not shun solid-state physics, but threw himself into it with a whole heart, intent on surpassing and superseding his parent's discoveries. Did he succeed? The scientific jury is, I believe, still out. In any case, my father is still alive, so the game is still in play, and will not be over until the Grim Reaper comes to call for a second time—which, given the present state of medical capability, might not be for a long time. My father has already scored one significant victory in outliving his model and rival, so I presume that he must be reckoned to have taken the lead—but we haven't spoken for years, and I'm no physicist, so I'm not sure exactly how their positions stand, in a purely scientific context.

The dysfunctional fever of arrogant competition being what it is, Peter Bell the Second was always going to produce a clone, and he was always going to do his utmost to make sure that his clone didn't follow the same path of fierce hatred that his father's clone had done. By the time he got around to the task of self-reproduction, ectogenetic technology had made numerous significant advances, so he had a better physiological armory at his disposal for the purposes of embryological direction and control. Whether he directed its use wisely, I am not the person to judge, but he does seem to have succeeded in making sure that I would not be the diehard rival to his accomplishments that he was to his father's. My scientific proclivities were always orientated in a different direction, and I think that my father was glad, although perhaps not wholeheartedly, when he eventually found out that he had spawned a geneticist.

Was he successful in the other aspect of his ambition? I think he was, but I can see how others might beg to disagree. I don't believe that I hate my father, and would say, if pressed, that I am utterly indifferent to him. On the other hand, I certainly do not love him—and, as I said, I haven't spoken to him in years. It would not trouble me unduly if I never spoke to him again, but I will go to his funeral, if and when the occasion arises. I owe him that much—and probably a good deal more, though nothing for which I feel particularly grateful.

I never had a mother, of course, so the fact that I never loved my father means that the only person I have ever loved, and perhaps ever will love, is, or was, Magdalen Usher—but I am not the object of this lesson, and am merely present within it to illustrate a general principle and its variations. The real point of the exercise, you will doubtless remember, is why Rosalind only ever had one son, but a multitude of daughters.

Rosalind was her father's daughter. Had her father not died while she was still relatively young—prematurely, in today's terms, although the fallout of the Crash was still rather unsettled thirty years ago—he might have taken a more active role in guiding her reproduction. He did die, though, and Rosalind was not content simply to echo his own choice, especially as the dramatic end of the perceived population crisis liberated her to think in terms of more than one child. Perhaps, in some sense, she could not be content to echo his choice, because she felt a powerful desire, if not an actual need, to replace him. At any rate, she decided that she would have a son, and a son of genius, but that she would try to compensate for the dysfunctions that might be attendant upon that genius by providing him with an intimate social relationship that would provide him with a private arena in which to learn and practice social skills, by giving him a near-twin half-sister.