Nature's Shift. Brian Stableford
Roderick and his associates had mounted a two-pronged assault on the problem, attempting to modify both the crop species and their specialist insect pollinators, in order to insulate both species from their ecosystemic environment, in what Roderick had labeled “dedicated symbiotic partnerships.” He aimed to free the crops from all the non-human species that used them as nourishment—the pests—and also to free their loyal insect handmaidens from predation and parasitism, while making sure that the handmaidens’ own nourishment was assured by the nectar of the species whose reproductive needs they served. He had set out to provide all the important food crops, one by one, with that kind of ecological insulation, and had made such rapid progress that, by the time Rosalind inherited his empire, there had been abundant scope for moving on, not merely to species used for food that were matters of gourmet delicacy rather than dietary staples, but to plant species that were economically significant for other reasons. Nowadays, the cutting edge of the Bee Queen’s vast Hive of Industry had little to do with foodstuffs, and much more to do with such refinements of plant perfume as olfactory psychotropics.
“So what are you working on nowadays?” I asked Professor Crowthorne, taking the lead in the inevitable ritual exchange that marks every meeting between scholars, even though the answer, nine times out of ten, is: “still the same old stuff.”
“Still the same old stuff,” the professor replied. “Modifying tree species for the production of construction materials...not that there’s much demand for specialist woods these days, given the ever-increasing versatility of neobacteria.” He looked up as he spoke, at the fabric of the glass dome, which now arched above us like an artificial firmament, more varied and more orderly than Nature’s sky.
“Wood will never go out of fashion,” I assured him. “In fact, once the current housing revolution has run its course, with respect to gross structures, the pendulum of preoccupation is bound to swing back to matters of décor. Craftsmen love wood. They always will. Plastic is strictly utilitarian; wood carries forward the legacy of life. The day of your greatness will come, Professor—never doubt it.”
He blushed—not with embarrassment, because I was laying it on too thick, but with pleasure, because I was at least making the effort to pretend that I cared.
“What about you?” he said. “Still a plant man?” Obviously, he hadn’t read any of my recent publications.
“Not exactly,” I said. “I retreated down the evolutionary scale somewhat. Most of my practical work nowadays is with marine algae.”
“Really?” he said. “That’s presumably why you’ve retreated to the far north—for the sea coast.” Lancaster wasn’t exactly the “far” north, and Morecambe Bay wasn’t exactly a major hub of the kelp-oil industry, but the professor was a Londoner, and didn’t know any different. In his view, the key word in his judgment was presumably “retreated.” Although he doubtless meant no insult to Lancaster’s status as a center of learning, it still counted as provincial in his world-view, which regarded Oxford and Cambridge as suburbs of London in spite of the geographical evidence to the contrary, and everywhere beyond the geographical Oxford as “the north.” On the other hand, he probably thought of all academic life as a quiet retreat from the hubbub of bioindustrial activity whose British heart, if not its soul, was Rosalind’s empire. He knew that, as Rowland’s best friend, I could have walked into Rosalind’s employment the day after graduation, and at any time thereafter. He probably regarded my failure to do so as a chronic lack of self-confidence.
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps, in fact, he was understating the case, and it had really been rank cowardice in the face of someone who wasn’t even an enemy, strictly speaking. In my view, of course, I was simply showing solidarity with Rowland, who might well have taken it as an insult if I had gone to work for Rosalind, even if I hadn’t done it until after Magdalen had returned to England...perhaps especially if I had done so after Magdalen’s return.
The professor must have felt that his lack of enthusiasm was impolite, given my heroic efforts to build up his own specialty, because he was quick to backtrack on his lukewarm judgment. “Important work, though, algal studies, quite apart from the marine oil industry” he said. “We don’t really know, as yet, how badly the littoral ecosystems were hit by the ecocatastrophe, do we? They were in the front line, after all, forced into rapid geographical shifts during the Antarctic Depletion. The resettlement isn’t simply going to put things back the way they were—it’s going to be a century or more until we can even measure the lingering effects, and evolution would be in tachytelic mode even if human creativity weren’t playing such a strong hand. How is the work going?”
“Slowly,” I said, philosophically. After “still the same old stuff,” there is no more hallowed response in the corridors of academe. One’s research is always going slowly, and one always has to admit the fact with an expression of philosophical resignation. In my case, though, it was true, and not because of the ever-pressing demands of teaching. Had I been working for Rosalind, of course, everything would have been different. In the Hive of Industry, everything moved rapidly. Urgency was the norm, philosophical resignation was prohibited, and results flowed in abundance, nourishing the world as the infant Zeus had once been nourished by Amalthea’s magical horn.
There was still some time to go before the ceremony was due to begin—the professor and I had been standing relatively close to the marquee when crowd dynamics began to move us, and we’d been among the first inside, although we’d naturally taken up positions in the rear, as befitted our lowly status. We had no alternative but to go on making conversation, and the Professor inevitably followed the script dictated by Fate.
“Do you know what it is that Rowland’s doing, out in the Orinoco delta?” he asked. “I haven’t seen any of his recent publications, I fear.”
“Not exactly,” I admitted. “He’s not very good at keeping in touch—and he doesn’t publish at all, so you haven’t actually missed out on anything—but we’re still friends.” I felt compelled to add the last remark, simply because the fact seemed so vulnerable to doubt.
“I’ve seen images of his gargantuan mud hut on the web,” the Professor said. “Quite an achievement in itself, though not as elegant as Roderick’s Pyramid. You and Rowland both did elective courses in civil engineering, didn’t you? Rowland was determined to match his grandfather’s qualifications as a true Renaissance Man, wasn’t he? You both did Practical Neurology too, as I remember, with old Fliegmann—he died five years ago, alas. You were keeping Rowland company, I assume—lending moral support. Magdalen stuck more narrowly to the central syllabus, as I recall. She was intelligent enough, but she didn’t have Rowland’s vaulting imagination.” Dutifully—because he hadn’t, after all been my personal tutor—he didn’t add: “Nor had you.”
“Rowland had a lot of interests,” I confirmed. “I tried to keep up, but I couldn’t. Magdalen, having grown up with him, had already given up, although Rosalind didn’t approve. Rosalind had intended them to be equals and collaborators—and she was probably right to believe that Magdalen was Rowland’s equal intellectually, only made timid by the backwash of his energy and his arrogance.”
“Arrogance is no sin in a scientist,” the professor observed—perhaps plaintively, since he was not an arrogant man himself. “The great ones always had infinite faith in themselves, and no respect at all for orthodoxy. That kind of attitude fuels the drive, the necessary obsession.”
He wasn’t just expressing regret for his own lack of that drive, and his own lack of greatness. He was looking at me. He had no right to do that. He didn’t know me at all.
“I expect that Rowland will come down from the Pyramid with the other family members, when the ceremony’s just about to start,” the professor opined, when I didn’t make any reply to his last remark. “I don’t know his other sisters, but I’d certainly recognize Rosalind if I saw her—she wasn’t mingling outside, was she?”
“Rosalind doesn’t mingle,” I said, flatly. “But I didn’t see any of the sisters either. I met most of them, when Rowland and I were still students, but they