Nature's Shift (2 page)

To me, the statement made by the colored marquee was one of raging against the dying of the light—but I knew that I had to be careful of seeing it through the lens of my own imaginative inclinations. Rowland had often criticized me for “thinking in quotes,” deeming the habit slavish. He was not an admirer of poetry himself, least of all Romantic poetry, and had not reacted well when I had once referred to him, intending to pay him a compliment, as a “tyger” burning bright in the forests of the night, although he had mercifully failed to understand when I had once addressed him in a slightly less complimentary mood, as “Manfred.”

There are, I know from experience, terminological purists who argue that glass-working is not, strictly speaking, gantzing, that label being—in their opinion—only applicable to processes of biological cementation that organize particulate matter. Because glass is a supercooled liquid rather than a agglomerated solid, the neobacteria responsible for its secretion and shaping have a distinctive biochemistry that is distinguished in several significant genomic and proteonomic ways from the kinds of gantzers that raise palaces from clay, granite or unrefined sand. I had never been that kind of purist, though, and had once taken a civil engineering course in company with Rowland, who thought that narrow definitions were almost as dangerous to mental flexibility as thinking in quotes. To our minds, the fact that “gantzing” was a derivative of a human surname rather than any kind of genetic terminology gave it a flexibility that fully entitled it to be applied to all kinds of modern building techniques, as laymen usually did. Leon Gantz had been a revolutionary, whose name was fully entitled to become legend and transcend pedantry; Roderick Usher's name might well have done likewise, had it not already been legendary, in an entirely different context.

That was why Roderick was usually known simply as Roderick, except when he was favored as Roderick the Great, and Rosalind simply as Rosalind, except when she was called the Queen Bee. The current House of Usher wanted nothing to do with a literary inheritance that was inseparable from the notion of falling, let alone the tacit notions of decadence and degeneracy.

I could sympathize with their attitude, even though the unfortunate literary implication of my own name was far too esoteric to qualify as legendary, and I wasn't entirely confident that my own existential trajectory was as diametrically opposed to the accidental precedent as the Ushers' was. Roderick and Rosalind were all about rising, resurrection and resistance to decay and degeneration: they were movers and shakers in the post-Crash restoration and revivification of the ecosphere, the legacy of the new Eden, and the conquest of death. As for Rowland…well, the jury was still out on that one. Rosalind was understandably disappointed in his refusal to work for the Hive, but I retained the loyal conviction that he too was a biotechnological creator of genius, destined to stimulate the course and cause of human progress.

The fact that Rowland had deliberately taken a flamboyantly independent course in his life and research, rather than following meekly in the tracks of his mother and grandfather, seemed to me to be essential to the prospect of his making an impact on the world. I thought that there was every reason to hope that the scope of his achievements would eventually turn out to be just as spectacular as those of his mother and grandfather. All three of them, at any rate, were firmly committed to the notion that upwards was the only way to go. In my view, though, the Earth is a sphere, and if you anchor your conceptual geometry to its center, every direction is up that leads to the light, and there's nowhere to fall at all: the worst case scenario is inertia, and contentment with the dark. That wasn't Rowland's style at all, no matter what uninformed observers might think of his retreat to the wilds of Venezuela and his long silence. He might have set his sights on stranger skies than the Hive's starry firmament, but they were definitely not earthbound.

That, at any rate, was what I thought as I made my way toward Magdalen's marquee, expecting to see him there, if not center stage, then as close to Rosalind as anyone would ever be permitted to get.

CHAPTER TWO

As I was still studying the colored dome from without, with what I hoped might pas for a connoisseur's eye, I finally caught a glimpse of someone I knew—who seemed distinctly relieved to catch sight of a familiar face. He hurried to meet me.

“Peter?” he said, as if he were uncertain as to the reliability of his memory. “Peter Bell?” He didn't add “the Third” because he hadn't known my father and grandfather, who had passed through the hallowed halls of Imperial College before his time—the time of his tenure, that is, not his life; he was considerably older than my father, and looked it. Even if he had overlapped with the time of my father's passage, he wouldn't have known him, because my father and I had studied different subjects.

I nodded my head, in case he really was in need of confirmation. “Professor Crowthorne,” I said. I tried to remember exactly how long it had been since I'd seen him, and settled on nine years, a couple of years after my doctorate had been conferred. I also tried to remember his first name, although I didn't imagine that I'd need to use it, but I couldn't. His initials were J. V., but whether he was a John, a James, a Julius or a Justin I had no idea. He hadn't changed a bit—but that was hardly surprising. He hadn't attempted to make use of somatic engineering to restore any kind of travesty of his lost youth, but he had made use of active cosmetics to freeze his features at the apparent age of fifty. At a rough estimate, he must have been seventy-five, but I knew that he hadn't retired from research, or even from teaching.

“Have you seen Rowland?” was, inevitably, the professor's next question. He had been Rowland's personal tutor at Imperial, and Magdalen's too, though not mine. He only knew me as a participant in his seminars.

“Not yet,” I told him. At that point in time, of course, I still expected to, although the fact that the professor hadn't seen him either did sound a slight semi-conscious alarm bell.

“I don't think any of the family have emerged from the Pyramid yet,” Crowthone was quick to add. “I suppose I should have said, have you seen Rowland
recently?
I tried to keep in touch, but…these days, distance isn't supposed to matter any more, but Venezuela hasn't recovered from the Crash yet, has it? How could it, having lost ninety-five per cent of its peak population?”

“Things still seem to be pretty bad out there,” I confirmed, although I only had the same newsfeeds to draw on as the professor.

One of the reasons why Rowland had moved to Venezuela was that it had one of the shorelines hit hardest by the ecocatastrophe. The delta region where he had taken up residence had been under the sea for more than a generation, and still suffered freak tides, as well as frequent hurricanes, on an irregular basis. It might have been feasible for the natives to begin building harbors again, but it would probably be another twenty years, at least, before any sort of local fishing industry became viable, and there were no custodians of that particular cultural tradition left in on the coast in question. Moving in had been a challenge even for someone with Rowland's inherited wealth and biotechnological abilities.

A bold gantzer was supposed to be able to erect buildings anywhere, but it had required something more than boldness to single out the Orinoco delta when Rowland had taken himself off there, and I doubted that he had a neighbor within two hundred miles, as yet, no matter how rapidly the nation's general reconstruction was proceeding in the west and along the Colombian border. The two great industries that had sustained the nation's economy, after a fashion, before the Crash—fossil oil and cocaine—were both as dead as the dodo. Genetic engineering had replaced them both, fossil oil with cane oil and kelp oil, and cocaine with a whole generation of stimulant drugs, by far the most fashionable of which was Aether. The surviving Venezuelans could only look with envious eyes at such neighbors as Trinidad and Brazil, which—for different reasons—had come through the collapse in much better economic shape.

“Not that I've seen anything more of Magdalen in recent years,” Professor Crowthorne added. “You must have kept in touch with her?”

“I'm afraid not,” I said. “We never really got back in touch, after she returned from Venezuela. I thought she might want to talk to me about it…about leaving Rowland behind, that is…and I kept expecting her to call, but somehow, it didn't seem appropriate for me to call her. Maybe we were both expecting the other to make the first move, both leaving it to the other—silly, I suppose. But I didn't feel that I could, in the circumstances, and months became years, and now….”

Now, it was too late, but I couldn't quite pronounce the words. The professor came to my rescue. “Time flies, alas,” he said. “For everyone, of course—but especially for scientists, I think. The scientific mind has to be adept at concentration, dedicated in focus, inexhaustibly patient…and all of that easily becomes a matter of shutting other people out, a means of obsession.” He sighed, then added: “A tragic business, this. Now that we're supposed to be able to live for hundreds of years…not that anyone's proven it yet…it seems a terrible shock when someone dies so young.”

The cautionary interjection was typical of him. He had a more intense interest in the possibility that humans might now be able to live for hundreds of years, by courtesy of advanced internal technology, than most people, having been born into an era in which centenarians were exceedingly rare and the Crash was making certain that even the citizens of Fortress Britain had less than a fifty-fifty chance of reaching their natural lifespan. Had there not been such sweeping changes in his lifetime, he might now be confronting the possibility of imminent death himself, but he had no way of knowing, at the dawn of the New Era, how long he might endure…or what new problems that endurance might throw up. His remark about the lack of proof wasn't just a reflection of his uneasy experiences during the tail end of the ecocatastrophe, though. He was by nature a cautious person, unprepared go take anything on trust that was as yet untested by time and experience.

Although I assumed that the primary reason for his refusal of any attempt to look younger had been the ridiculousness that most such cosmetic endeavors conferred on their victims, I suspected that Professor J. V. Crowthorne actually liked the venerable look, feeling that it was not only suited to his status as a university teacher but to his personality. Some people are born to peak at twenty-one, and every sign of aging they accumulate is an insult to their beautiful identity, but some are born to peak in advanced maturity, and moderate aging befits the image of their essential wisdom. He was one of the latter.

I was a university teacher myself too, now, but I calculated on keeping my youthful appearance for a long time yet, even though beauty was definitely not my strong suit. By the time I reached seventy—still more than thirty years in the future—I suspected that venerable would be completely out of fashion, even in science and politics.

I agreed with the professor that Magdalen's premature death was tragic, of course. I also agreed with his judgment that time flew, and his assessment of the proclivities of the scientific mind, but didn't bother to say so. I got the impression that he wanted to ask me whether I knew how Magdalen had died, but didn't dare, for fear of indelicacy. In fact, I didn't know, but I had the same inevitable suspicion that he did. When anyone dies young these days, unless they do it in public, as the victim of a traffic accident or some kind of sporting misadventure, the first question that springs to anyone's mind isn't
how
but
why
. When such a death isn't suicide, the actual cause tends to be boldly advertised, so as to set aside any possibility of misunderstanding. Even though Rosalind was a law unto herself, I couldn't imagine her allowing people to believe, by default, that Magdalen had killed herself, unless she actually had. If it had been some exotic disease or untreatable cancer—for such things are not yet extinct, by any means—the fact would surely have been published, but the web had been silent. The people who knew the cause of Magdalen's death were maintaining silence.

Which did not, of course, make her death any less tragic.

“I've never been here before,” Professor Crowthorne said, deliberately looking away from the marquee at the Crystal Palaces, and meekly allowing his gaze to be trapped and drawn upwards by the mighty pyramid. “I arrived early, so I was able to have a quick look around. It's very impressive, isn't it?”

“Yes it is,” I agreed. “I haven't been here in quite a while myself. The site has expanded since then, but this area is much the same. It was always impressive—as it was designed to be. I never met Roderick, but I know that he took his Greatness seriously. When he decided to found an Eden, he didn't just want to match the mythical one; he wanted to better it.”

“He can hardly be blamed for having a sense of his own grandeur,” the professor observed, as the crowd began to converge on the entrance to the marquee and we automatically moved with it, falling into step side-by-side like well-disciplined marionettes. “It wasn't a delusion. Even if he had only solved the bee problem….”

He left it there because he knew that he didn't have to go on. He might not have been entirely certain about my name, but he knew that I must have heard him explain that particular aspect of the “emergent ecocrisis” before, and shouldn't slip into lecturing mode now.

Solving “the bee problem” had only been the beginning of Roderick's great career. If it had been a unique problem, it wouldn't have been too difficult to solve. Natural selection might even have done the trick by itself, without the aid of genetic engineering, if civilization had had a hundred years to spare. Once genetic engineering had got into its stride in the early twenty-first century, the task of producing strains of bees that were immune to colony collapse disorder wasn't all that difficult, technically speaking. If Roderick Usher hadn't done it, other people would have filled the breach readily enough. In fact, though, “the bee problem” had only been a symptom of a more general malaise, and it was in tackling the many facets of the bigger problem that Roderick had truly demonstrated his greatness.

The ecosystemic connections between insect species, and between insects and the species above and below them in the food-chain, had been forged over tens of millions of years of evolution, in an environment that was constantly changing—but not at the pace suddenly inflicted on it by the rapid growth of human civilization, modern agriculture and an aggressive war launched against insect “pests” by humankind. In the early phases of that war, it hadn't been easy to distinguish insect friends from insect foes, and the secondary effects of specific assaults had been incalculable.

Fundamentally, the problem had been fairly simple, and offered several possible routes to potential solution. Many of the crops that humans relied on as primary producers, to feed themselves and their livestock, were pollinated by insects, a significant number of them by specialist pollinators like bees. When the specialists began to run into trouble, there were several ways that the problem could have been tackled. New primary producers could, in theory, have been selected, developed or designed. New ways of cultivating the existing primary producers, which freed them from dependency on insect pollinators, could, in theory, have been devised. The simplest and most straightforward approach was, however a matter of producing specialist pollinators that were immune to the particular trouble in question, either by modifying the existing specialists or producing substitutes, whether by selective breeding or direct genetic manipulation.

Roderick and his associates had mounted a two-pronged assault on the problem, attempting to modify both the crop species and their specialist insect pollinators, in order to insulate both species from their ecosystemic environment, in what Roderick had labeled “dedicated symbiotic partnerships.” He aimed to free the crops from all the non-human species that used them as nourishment—the pests—and also to free their loyal insect handmaidens from predation and parasitism, while making sure that the handmaidens' own nourishment was assured by the nectar of the species whose reproductive needs they served. He had set out to provide all the important food crops, one by one, with that kind of ecological insulation, and had made such rapid progress that, by the time Rosalind inherited his empire, there had been abundant scope for moving on, not merely to species used for food that were matters of gourmet delicacy rather than dietary staples, but to plant species that were economically significant for other reasons. Nowadays, the cutting edge of the Bee Queen's vast Hive of Industry had little to do with foodstuffs, and much more to do with such refinements of plant perfume as olfactory psychotropics.

“So what are you working on nowadays?” I asked Professor Crowthorne, taking the lead in the inevitable ritual exchange that marks every meeting between scholars, even though the answer, nine times out of ten, is: “still the same old stuff.”

“Still the same old stuff,” the professor replied. “Modifying tree species for the production of construction materials...not that there's much demand for specialist woods these days, given the ever-increasing versatility of neobacteria.” He looked up as he spoke, at the fabric of the glass dome, which now arched above us like an artificial firmament, more varied and more orderly than Nature's sky.

“Wood will never go out of fashion,” I assured him. “In fact, once the current housing revolution has run its course, with respect to gross structures, the pendulum of preoccupation is bound to swing back to matters of décor. Craftsmen love wood. They always will. Plastic is strictly utilitarian; wood carries forward the legacy of life. The day of your greatness will come, Professor—never doubt it.”