Nature's Shift. Brian Stableford
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