Nature's Shift. Brian Stableford

Great Pyramid had been Roderick’s—and she had obviously felt that she ought to stick to what she did best, especially, for her eldest daughter’s funeral.

      Magdalen’s was, I presumed, the first family funeral Rosalind had ever had to organize. She had been too young to take a hand in planning Roderick’s. In any case, the Great Man had surrounded himself with an entourage of organizers, and would probably have designed every last detail of his own funeral in advance, so that his actual death merely functioned as a trigger setting the mechanism in motion, leaving nothing for Rosalind to do but learn her own allotted bit part. How she must have hated that, even as a child! All of her other daughters were still alive, as was her one and only son.

      The marquee was a dome of glass—a dome of many-colored glass, in fact. It was however, a plain dome, geometrically speaking, and its many colors retained a dutiful fidelity to the harmonics of the Newtonian spectrum. It was elegant and tasteful, if not obviously funereal at first glance. Some people might have mistaken its hemispherical smoothness and its insistent colors for an attempt to lighten the mood—a belated attempt to resurrect the twenty-first century vogue for pretending that funerals ought to be celebrations of life rather than defiant resentments of death—but Rosalind was the last person in the world to try to resurrect a vogue that was stupid as well as obsolete. She had nothing at all against resurrection, but she was a strict utilitarian in that regard. She had lived through the worst years of the Crash as a child and adolescent, and even though her view of it had been largely obtained from the top of Roderick’s Great Pyramid, she knew what death was, and knew that it was not something to be met meekly, with eyes turned resolutely backwards.

      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