Nature's Shift. Brian Stableford
Borgo Press Fiction by Brian Stableford
Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations
The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales
Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica
Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales
Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies
The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy
The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future
The Eleventh Hour
The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5)
Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future
Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions
The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)
The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions
In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story
Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses
The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania
The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future
Nature’s Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels
The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4)
The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera
Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine
Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3)
The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession
The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas
Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)
Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies
Swan Song (Hooded Swan #6)
The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism
The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below
Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Author’s Note
This novel is loosely based on a short story entitled “The Growth of the House of Usher,” which first appeared in Interzone 24 in 1988.
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1988, 2011 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Linda
EPIGRAPH
But from the first ’twas Peter’s drift
To be a kind of moral eunuch,
He touched the hem of Nature’s shift
Felt faint—and never dared uplift
The closest, all-concealing tunic.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Peter Bell the Third”
CHAPTER ONE
I didn’t want to go to the funeral. I told myself repeatedly, while I waited for the trains that took me from Lancaster to Birmingham, Birmingham to Bristol, and from Bristol to Exeter, that I would do better to turn around and go home, and avoid any reconnection with the desolate past. I told myself again when I caught my first glance of the Crystal Palaces of Eden and the Great Pyramid in the distance. I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of nostalgia, of course, but any affection I had for the place, and the memories associated with it, was drowned by the residue of disappointment it had left behind, and the aching wreckage of…well, calling it a broken heart would probably be stretching cliché too far.
I was still telling myself that I shouldn’t have come when I was confronted by the huge gates of Eden, far more steely than pearly. They were manned by uniformed security guards, and when I told one of them my name I had a faint, absurd flash of hoping that he might consult a list on his phone or a virtual palm-print, decide that I wasn’t on it, and turn me away.
The fact that he didn’t have to consult his phone or the palm of his hand seemed somehow ominous, although it was presumably just a tribute to technical elegance. I didn’t suppose that the poor fellow had been required to memorize two hundred names—there were more than four hundred people at the ceremony, but they included a lot of family groups—so I concluded that he had some kind of subtle earpiece relaying information to him from a central control-room, whose guardians obviously had eyes as well as ears on me.
At any rate, the petty Saint Peter didn’t turn poor Sinner Peter away, or even ask to see any kind of documentation. I didn’t have an invitation, as such—but someone, presumably Rosalind, had taken the trouble to send me a notification of the time and place of the funeral, not via the web but by means of a courier-delivered black-rimmed card. I had it in my pocket, just in case. Would I have had the courage to refrain from showing it, if I had been asked, in order to be turned away? Probably not. I had come at the way from Lancaster, after all, even though I knew, deep down, that I shouldn’t have.
I mustn’t exaggerate, though. It wasn’t a case of fascination, like those old myths about birds hypnotized by snakes. I was there because I needed to be there, even though I knew I shouldn’t want to. I needed to see Rowland again. I needed to give him my sincere condolences. It never occurred to me for an instant that he wouldn’t be present at his own sister’s funeral—and not just any sister, but Magdalen. That was beyond belief, even for Rowland.
If I’d known that he wouldn’t be there, I probably wouldn’t have gone—not because of any disrespect for Magdalen, with whom I had once been in love, or even because the thought of having to face Rosalind without any protective presence to shield me from her glare was too much to bear, but simply because Rowland’s absence would have made the whole occasion seem pointless. It was almost as if, without Rowland there to bear witness, Magdalen couldn’t possibly be dead, and the funeral couldn’t possibly be taking place.
At any rate, I did want to see Rowland; that was the only reason I had for going back to Eden. We were still friends, in some mysterious sense independent of actual communication. Even if he did take invisibility to extraordinary lengths when it came to web-presence and web communication—to the extent that people who did not know him would have declared him a friendless recluse—I knew that there was something unbreakable and eternal in the bond we had forged in our late teens and early twenties. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since he had taken up residence thousands of miles away in Venezuela, in the most remote spot he could find—presumably in order to get away from Rosalind, although that bond too was eternal and unbreakable—and it was at least seven years since I’d spoken to him over the phone, but the omission was a result of careless neglect, not design.
I hadn’t spoken to Magdalen either—in fact, I hadn’t seen or spoken to Magdalen since she’d left Venezuela to return home, after not much more than a year in the tropics. It wouldn’t have surprised me very much to learn that Rowland hadn’t spoken to Magdalen for years either, in spite of the fact that their bond was the most intimate