Nature's Shift. Brian Stableford

It’s ten years since I’ve seen any of them—they wouldn’t remember me.”

      “I’m surprised by that…that you didn’t keep in touch with the family,” the professor ventured, probing as subtly as he could, because he knew that he was on sensitive ground.

      “I shouldn’t have let things slide,” I admitted. “I wish that Magdalen had taken the trouble to call me, though, if…when…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. If, or when Magdalen had decided to kill herself, she probably hadn’t called anyone. I wasn’t the only one she hadn’t turned to in extremis.

      “You were...quite fond of her, though, back then?”

      “Yes,” I confirmed, through teeth that were only slightly gritted, “quite fond.”

      He knew when a subject had to be dropped, and returned to safer ground. “I thought that Roland would make an insect man back then,” he said, settling back into his rut, in terms of his phraseology as well as his subject-matter. “In spite of all the flirtations with strange sidelines, I thought he’d eventually take up where Roderick had left off, Rosalind having gone off at something of a tangent.”

      “According to the Usher family doctrine,” I said, only a trifle sarcastically, “there’s no such thing as an insect man per se. In Roderick the Great’s vocabulary, insects are components of dedicated symbiotic partnerships; their early evolution took place in harness with the evolution of flowering plants, as a complex pas de deux. In Usher mythology, an insect’s place is in the bosom of a flower, trading its services as a pollen-distributor for nectar.”

      “You’re being flippant,” he said. “That might apply, albeit loosely, to bees, but insects are extraordinarily versatile, ecologically speaking—almost as versatile as worms. Only a tiny minority are involved in pollination, or any other kind of symbiosis, and then only as imagoes.”

      “That was the past, Professor,” I reminded him. “The Ushers are looking to the future. From now on…from fifty years ago, in fact…the fate of insects is to be whatever the Hive of Industry wants them to be. Pests out, symbiotes in, no neutrals. Anyway, insects were never all that versatile. There might still be hundreds of thousands of beetle species left, out of the pre-Crash millions, but they’re all just beetles. The insects never contrived to recolonize the sea in the way that reptiles, mammals and birds did. There aren’t any insects in my little corner of creation—yet.”

      “You’re still being flippant,” was Professor Crowthorne’s expert judgment. Gallantly, he added: “And why not? We take ourselves and our work too seriously, sometimes—and in the face of tragedy, of matters that we can’t control, no matter how clever we might be as biotechnicians, what psychological weapons do we have, except for a refusal not to take things too seriously? You have to laugh or you’d cry—isn’t that what they say up there in Lancashire.”

      His idea of northern parlance had obviously been forged by historical dramas on TV, but he meant well.

      “So it’s rumored,” I agreed.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Fortunately, the family members were beginning to make their appearance and fill up the front rows of the auditorium. The daughters didn’t enter in a disciplined file, but there was an order of sorts to their gradual filtration. The older ones were looking after the younger ones. I wasn’t really counting—I was looking for Rowland, still believing that he was bound to appear—but I couldn’t help being aware that the daughters were more than a dozen strong, perhaps nearer to twenty in total.

      Rowland didn’t appear. Maybe, I thought, right up until the last possible moment, he was going to come in last, escorting Rosalind as a dutiful son should. Maybe, I thought, the tragedy of Magdalen’s suicide—or Magdalen’s death, if it had been accidental—had brought them together in grief, had healed their differences and united the family again. Maybe, I thought, there might be something resembling a happy ending to place in the credit column against the debit of Magdalen’s loss, to provide some crumb of consolation, if not to produce some impossible semblance of balance in the books.

      But Rowland didn’t appear. When Rosalind finally made her grand entrance, she was alone: unaccompanied, unsupported, devoid of any symbiotic partnership, dedicated or otherwise.

      How could I ever have thought that it might be otherwise? Of course Rosalind was alone. If Rowland had been there, he would have been sent to sit down, not allowed to stand beside Rosalind, or even slightly behind her.

      She was perfectly composed, and quite beautiful, in her own way. In an era of sophisticated somatic engineering, any woman can be beautiful, in a conventional sense, but distinctive beauty is still rare and precious, and Rosalind had it, more than any of her beautiful daughters. She wasn’t as pretty as Magdalen, as charming as Magdalen or as lovable as Magdalen, but she was more beautiful, not because of her metallic blonde hair or her striking pale blue eyes, or the delicacy of her nose, or the symmetry of her ears and chin, but because she was Rosalind, the Queen Bee, in all her absolute majesty. Web chatter sometimes likened her to Cleopatra or Catherine the Great, but those models were morally compromised; the most frequently-cited analogy by far was to Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.

      Rosalind had twenty children, but she had never married, and never would. The idea was unthinkable. Unlike Elizabeth, she didn’t even have “favorites.” She was always unescorted, at social occasions of every sort.

      She looked magnificent. I had no doubt that she would be magnificent. It was Magdalen’s funeral, but it was her show.

      “He’s not here, is he?” said Professor Crowthorne, in a whisper that had horror in it as well as amazement.

      “No,” I said, in a much more level tone. “He’s not here. He hasn’t come.”

      My first instinct was not so much to explore possible reasons for Rowland’s absence, but to find excuses for him—excuses I hadn’t been able to find, in the event, for myself.

      Perhaps Rowland and Magdalen had enjoyed—or had at least believed that they enjoyed—such a close union of mind and spirit that Rowland felt that his presence in spirit made any physical presence at her funeral quite irrelevant. Perhaps they had been so close—and yet, paradoxically, so far apart—that Rowland had been overwhelmed by grief. Perhaps he was ill in bed, unable to travel. Perhaps….

      Rosalind, I knew, would not have tolerated any excuses of those sorts. She was the kind of hard-line positivist who thought all talk of “spirit” nonsensical; the only kind of presence she recognized was physical presence. Grief she did believe in, but did not believe that it could or should be incapacitating. Illness she undoubtedly believed in too, but similarly believed that it could not and should not be incapacitating, unless literally mortal. In Rosalind’s view, I had no doubt, Rowland should have been sitting meekly in the front row, with all his sisters—perhaps positioned arrogantly at their head, but nevertheless with them, in the junior ranks of the family.

      In theory, I suppose I agreed with her standpoint—but I admit to being a slightly fuzzy thinker, and when it came to Rowland, and Magdalen too, I was prepared to think in terms of spirit, and incapacitating grief. There had always been something slightly uncanny about Rowland, and if there was one person in the world who might be capable of surviving death as a ghost, in the minds of people who had known her, it was Magdalen. But still, Rowland should have been there. Whatever excuse he had, he should have set it aside, for Magdalen’s sake.

      I could only speculate, of course, as to the effect the Magdalen’s return to Eden, after little more than a year in Venezuela—her desertion, as he would have seen it—must have had on Rowland. That was one of the many things about which he maintained absolute web-silence. I could understand that he might have felt deeply offended—angry, even—but not to the extent that he would refuse to attend her funeral.

      Obviously, I wasn’t the only person who had expected to see Rowland there, although there was probably only one other who had turned up for that express purpose, because there was a ripple of reaction when the other members of the crowd realized what the professor and I had