Nature's Shift. Brian Stableford
now.
Inevitably, I only recognized a tiny fraction of the people making their way along the pathways toward the purpose-built marquee where the ceremony was to be held. Everyone was on foot; although there was a driveway leading from the steely gates to the base of the Pyramid, all vehicles had been halted at the gate and diverted into an ad hoc car park. Today, Eden was for pedestrians only. There was no way of getting to the marquee without smelling the flowers, save for donning a gas mask.
You can get very unobtrusive gas masks nowadays—bimolecular films that are as invisible as a recluse’s web-presence—but it would have been impolite to wear one to a funeral. Even though I didn’t recognize ninety-five per cent of the mourners, and only knew most of the rest from the TV, I didn’t suppose for a moment that they included anyone impolite. After all, we all knew that there was nothing to fear in a crudely literal sense—that Rosalind had no wish to harm us. Subtle manipulation was, of course, a different matter. That was her deepest inclination as well as her chief stock-in-trade. When he was in a slightly vindictive mood, Rowland had been wont to remark that although God had almost equaled Rosalind’s talent as a creator, he’d never shown anything like her ability as a control-freak. People with a sense of humor always laughed at that, assuming that he was making a slightly off-color joke. I never did. I’d actually met Rosalind, on several occasions, when Rowland and Magdalen had invited me to their exotic home, and had felt the awesome force of her personality.
Have the flower-beds been specially replanted for the occasion? I couldn’t help wondering, as I walked between two that were gloriously in flower—even though it was April and the Met Office directors, ever sticklers for tradition, were keeping the weather cool and showery—and if so, what effect are the flowers supposed to have?
There was nothing gloomy about the visual aspect of the flowers, which were mostly in pastels shades of blue, yellow, purple and pink, without a lily to be seen, but Rosalind wasn’t that unsubtle, except when she really wanted to be, and I knew that any kicker would be in the scents. Had Rosalind’s research in psychotropics achieved sufficient sophistication to allow her to engineer flowers that would assist mourners to cultivate an appropriately mournful mood? Probably—but that would have been an insult of sorts. If the scents of Eden’s flowers had been carefully planned for the occasion, according to her own aesthetic scheme, they would be sowing more complex emotions than mere sadness. When it came to moving in mysterious ways, God might still have the edge on Rosalind, but not by much.
This had been Roderick’s Eden before it was Rosalind’s however, so I didn’t just look at the flowers. I searched for their pollinators, expecting bees—but what I actually found was black butterflies. As soon as I saw them, fluttering discreetly between the blooms, I kicked myself mentally for not having guessed. It was the perfect combination of delicacy and ostentation. Black butterflies: the perfect mutes to lead a funeral procession for one of Rosalind’s daughters, one of the pillars of the Hive of Industry. Black bees couldn’t have done the job nearly so well.
Before the Crash, I knew, there had been a species of butterfly called a Mourning Cloak, but its wings had not been black. The butterflies in Eden’s specially-replanted beds were not a resurrected or simulated species; they were new. They were Magdelen’s butterflies, made for her commemoration. If the Hive of Industry’s marketing department decided that there was money to be made out of funeral butterflies, the ones supplied for future events would not be the same as these; Rosalind would make sure of that.
Even after I had seen and understood the significance of the butterflies, it took me at least three minutes to relax and breathe with some semblance of natural rhythm as I moved through the flowers-beds. The only olfactory sensations of which I was conscious were sweet, pleasant and welcoming—but the whole point of olfactory psychotropics is that they by-pass consciousness entirely and work at a deeper mental level, so I couldn’t be certain, purely on the grounds of what I was feeling consciously, that there wasn’t some subtler subconscious effect. The very uncertainty and confusion of my feelings seemed to be a guarantee of sorts that there was no insidious manipulation going on, and that the pleasant scents were exactly what they seemed, but….
I abandoned the vicious circularity of that train of thought.
They were pleasant scents, and not in any crude quasi-pheromonal sense. They might not have been calculated to make people feel sad, but any reference they were making to the ancestral olfactory spectrum was quite chaste; even their sweetness seemed strangely wholesome, although there isn’t a lot of room for sophistication in that regard. On the other hand, if anyone were capable of discovering a new kind of sweetness, it would surely be Rosalind, or one of her daughters. Rosalind was not to be underestimated, in biotechnical terms, and nor were her daughters. She was, after all, the Queen Bee as well as the Bee Queen, and her surviving offspring were fearsome workers.
Even Magdalen had been a fearsome worker, in her way. Not that Rowland was any sort of drone, of course, but he had always stuck out as something of an anomaly within the family, even if one contrived to set aside his sex. He wasn’t by any means a fly in the ointment, but he wasn’t a team player either. While his sisters worked with relentless determination on Rosalind’s behalf, following the disciplined lines of Rosalind’s imagination, Rowland had always been determined to exert his independence, not merely to do what Rosalind did not want to do, but, if possible—and it was a very big if—to do things that couldn’t or shouldn’t be done, in Rosalind’s opinion. When I had first met him, I had assumed that it was a perfectly natural teenage rebellion against parental authority—with which I, of all people, had every reason to sympathize—but as I had got to know him better I had learned that it cut much deeper than that the usual generation-gap issues. I had sympathized with that, too.
Some of his more casual acquaintances had thought—and said—that he was merely taking after Rosalind, because she had taken a similar attitude to her father, but Rowland always denied that, and Magdalen had always backed him up. I had never had the privilege of meeting Roderick the Great myself—he had died many years before I met Rowland and Magdalen—so I had never had the opportunity to study Rosalind in the role of daughter, only that of matriarch.
I decided, on due reflection, that the scent of the flowers produced for the occasion couldn’t have been loaded with psychotropics of any sort, because Rosalind would definitely have considered any ploy of that sort beneath her dignity. That didn’t mean, however, that they couldn’t intended to create a funereal mood by underhanded means, because Rosalind understood the placebo effect as well as anyone. The mere possibility that the flowers might be psychotropic, and might be intended to cultivate sadness, might lead some people actually to feel sadness. Sadness is only an emotion, after all, and in Rosalind’s world-view, emotion was mostly illusion….
There was a threat of vicious circularity in that line of thought too, and I abandoned it.
In any case, there was no illusion at all in the gut-wrenching sadness that I felt as I approached the marquee, because I wasn’t some client of the Hive putting on show of polite solidarity. In my case, there was no need for any artificial stimulus of any sort. I wasn’t the only person who had loved Magdalen, by any means, but I had loved her best, and longest.
The general mood, as the crowd became more compact around the marquee, did seem decidedly solemn, though. Perhaps, I thought, even in a crowd almost entirely made up of people who did business with Rosalind rather than people who had known Magdalen personally, my grief might somehow be contagious—but that was sheer nonsense, and I tried to pull myself together.
The marquee wasn’t any kind of standard model, of course. Funeral marquees are becoming rare nowadays—though not as rare as wedding marquees—because the conquest of death is making real progress, and rarity has inevitably bred originality as well as ostentation, but the majority of atheist funerals still retain the lessons of church architecture in attempting to cultivate an atmosphere of substituted sanctity. Add a crucifix or two and most of the structures in which early twenty-second century funeral ceremonies are held could still one mistaken for chapels or temples…but not the one that Rosalind had build for Magdalen.
Roderick the Great had been, among his many other talents, a gantzer of genius, and Rosalind hadn’t forsaken