Читать книгу Nature's Shift - Brian Stableford - Страница 9

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 realized. It wasn’t exactly a murmur of disapproval, but it was audible and tangible. Magdalen’s brother wasn’t there: only her sisters, and her mother.

All eyes were on Rosalind anyway, but the general awareness of Rowland’s absence focused that attention even more intently, and lent an extra dimension of sympathy to it.

Rosalind probably wasn’t quite as old as Professor Crowthorne, but she was certainly in her seventies, at least. She had made far more use of somatic engineering to modify her appearance than he had, but she had been equally wise in not attempting to preserve the visual illusion that she might be in her twenties. She was not interested in seeming venerable, but she was even less interested in seeming youthful. She wanted to appear mature in her distinctive beauty, not because maturity implied wisdom, but because it implied power—real power, not the ineffectual sham manifested by such historical lightweights as Elizabeth I. The cast of her features was not masculine, but it was not feminine either, unless one assumed—as some sycophantic commentators had been willing and eager to do—that it was the type-specimen of a new femininity, which would eventually redefine the notion.

She seemed capable of redefining such terms as “beautiful” and “regal,” and I mean no insult in saying that the funeral brought out the best in her. She was clad in black, but she was no mute butterfly. She was a human Queen Bee from top to toe, in her sober and somber mourning-dress. Lesser mortals still hired minister-substitutes to act as masters-of-ceremonies in humanist funerals, but not Rosalind. Rosalind took the podium herself, and it was obvious that she would be in charge from beginning to end, no matter who else she might invite to eulogize or sing.

There were eulogies, of which Rosalind’s was the most elegant, if not the longest; there was also music, some of it accompanied by voices. There was no mention, by anyone, of the cause of Magdalen’s death. There was no mention either, by anyone, of Rowland. How Rosalind improvised a eulogy without mentioning that Magdalen had a twin of sorts, I’m not entirely sure, but she did. She spoke about her love for her first-born daughter, and her other daughters’ love for their eldest sister, and she said something about Magdalen’s significant contributions to the work of the Hive of Industry, but she never mentioned that Magdalen had ever visited Venezuela. I noticed those absences far more than the words that were actually pronounced, perhaps because I was numb with the shock of Rowland’s absence.

As soon as the disbelief wore off, I resumed thinking, with all the force that mentality could muster: I shouldn’t have come. I should have had the courage to stay away. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? I actually felt resentful. I felt as if I had somehow been tricked—as if the possibility of seeing Rowland had been dangled as a lure, but that, on taking the bait, I had found nothing but a cruelly-barbed steel hook.

It was nonsense, of course. I hadn’t even been invited to the funeral, let alone lured. I had merely been given permission to attend, if I wished, not because I had once known Rowland, but because I had once known Magdalen. I had been given permission to attend because I had once loved Magdalen, very dearly, and because Rosalind had known that Magdalen—however she had died—would have wanted the people who had loved her dearly to be at her funeral. Rowland didn’t come into it…except that what had sprung first and foremost to the minds of ingrates like myself and Professor J. V. Crowthorne, who had known and loved Magdalen as a component in a dedicated symbiotic relationship, had been the possibility of seeing the living remainder of that relationship, not the corpse of its extinct fraction.

Not that we actually got to see a corpse. There was a container, in the geometrical center of the circle mapped out by the dome’s circumference, but it wasn’t even a coffin. The legally-required cremation had already taken place, in private; all that was offered to the contemplation of the mourners was a casket the size of a tea-caddy, which presumably contained her ashes. I say presumably not because I doubted that she was really dead, or because I doubted that that the contents of the casket really were the residue of her cremation, or because I had any cynical reservations about identifying post-cremation ashes with a person, but simply because we had to presume. All we could actually see was a casket. We had to imagine its contents.

Would it have been better if we had been able to see her, rebeautified by the embalmer’s art, lying on a silk cushion in a human-sized box? I doubt it—but the presence of the casket did serve to emphasize the mystery still surrounding her death. It did imply, however unreasonably, that there had been, and still was, something to hide.

In all probability, no one else in Britain would have been able to hide the circumstances of a death, in spite of all the legal and moral restrictions associated with the New Privacy, but the Ushers were true masters of the game of virtual invisibility. What they did not want to be known remained unknown; that was all there was to it.

The ceremony did not last long. It was over in ten minutes less than an hour, although a few minutes were left thereafter for silent contemplation. No one broke ranks while Rosalind was still standing there, head bowed. I thought for a moment or two that she was going to measure out the hour exactly, to the second, but she had too much style for that. The silence only lasted three minutes before the moment of suspension was officially ended, and Rosalind slipped into a new style of discourse to thank us all for coming.

She didn’t apologize for the fact that no refreshments had been laid on, and that there was no be no “wake,” but she did invite everyone to explore Eden at their leisure. She didn’t say so, but the implication was that breathing the atmosphere of that sacred place was bound to reward the soul more lavishly than any supply of food and alcohol. As for filling the stomach—well, that was a vulgar business best left to the hidden recesses of the New Privacy.

The family then began to filter out as they had filtered in—except for Rosalind, who marched along the aisle to the main entrance, and stationed herself on the threshold in order to shake the hand of everyone in the audience, and thank them for coming.

That took a long time. Because Professor Crowthorne and I were a lot closer to the back than the front, we could have made a dash for it and got out into the open, sweet-scented air in less than five minutes, but neither of us was in a mood for dashing, and neither of us was in a hurry to look into Rosalind’s eyes. A full fifteen minutes of awkward silence had elapsed before we were impelled forward by the ebb tide of the multitude and found ourselves on the threshold.

I let the professor go first.

“Professor Crowthorne,” said Rosalind, who might have needed a subtle earpiece to remind her who some of our fellow mourners were, but gave every indication of recognizing Magdalen’s former tutor at first glance. “Thank you for coming. Magdalen always spoke very highly of your enthusiasm as an educator, and the support you gave her when she first left home.”

Apart from the “always,” I figured that it might almost have been true. The professor did have enthusiasm as an educator; he might be a poor communicator in other respects, but when it came to waxing lyrical about his subject, he was a human dynamo. It went with the territory; I was in a position to understand that now. He would also have done his utmost to lend Magdalen moral support when she found herself in a strange institution, far from home—even though she already had the support of her loving brother.

“Peter,” said Rosalind, moving on before I was quite ready. She seized the hand that I held out reflexively, but instead of the curt and tokenistic pressure she’d afforded to the professor, she actually hung on to mine. “Thank you for coming. I need to talk to you. I’m busy just now, as you can see, but if you wouldn’t mind waiting—please take a look around the Palaces for an hour or two, and go up to the Pyramid whenever you please. I’ll try to be there by four o’clock, but I’m sure you’ll understand if I’m a little late.”

I opened my mouth as if to reply, but she had released my hand as soon as she reached the end of her sentence, and I knew that she neither wanted nor expected a reply—not even the merest sign of assent. The Queen had spoken; I, her subject, had only to obey. Still in the grip of the current that was flowing onwards and outwards, I found myself outside, in the soft spring sunlight, amid the sweet scents and the black butterflies. Was it only an illusion that the latter now seemed more abundant?

Helplessly, I checked my watch. It was ten past one; the ceremony had begun at noon. Rosalind expected me to kick my heels for the best part of three hours—and then to forgive her if she was “a little late.”

“Well,” said Professor Crowthorne, “that’s quite a privilege.”

“Is it?” replied, automatically. My voice was a trifle hoarse, so the acid sarcasm didn’t quite come out as intended.

“What do you suppose she wants?” the professor asked, curiously.

What do you think she wants, you silly old fool? I didn’t reply. Aloud, and meekly, all I said was: “I expect she wants to ask me about Rowland. She probably imagines that we’re still in touch. She wants to ask me why he’s not here—she probably thinks he told me that he wasn’t going to come, and left it to me to explain why.”

“I was surprised when he didn’t come in with the rest of the family,” the professor observed, although he’d already expressed his surprise more eloquently than any mere report could contrive. Reaching for even deeper levels of banality, he added: “A pity, that—I was hoping to see him. Surely he must have warned his mother that he wasn’t going to be here, though?”

I shouldn’t have come, I thought. “Actually,” I said, “Rowland being Rowland, I’d have been surprised if he had given Rosalind prior notice of his absence. But I’m genuinely surprised that he isn’t here. I expected him to be here. I suppose I’m not surprised that he didn’t warn me either—but I wish he had.”

“Rather bad form, in my opinion,” Professor Crowthorne continued. “I mean, there’s nothing unusual about boys falling out with their mothers, especially when their mothers are as…forceful…as Ms. Usher—but missing your own sister’s funeral! And the closest sister of them all! I know they weren’t really twins, in the sense that they shared a womb, but they were the same age.”

Rowland and Magdalen had been incubated ectogenetically, and they were the produce of different sperm-donors, but they had, indeed, been born within a few hours of one another, having always been envisaged as a pair: a dedicated symbiotic unit.

“How old are you and Rowland now?” the professor went on, when I didn’t step in to fill his pause. “Thirty-six? Thirty-seven? Too old to be nursing adolescent grudges, that’s for sure. This could have been a golden opportunity to build bridges, mend fences, heal wounds. Rowland should have been here, for his own sake as well as his mother’s.”

And mine, I thought. “It’s not that easy,” I said, weakly. “We’re in a brave new world now. The old clichés don’t apply any more.”

“Are you quoting Shakespeare or Huxley?” he asked, although the obvious answer was both. “Either way, you’re wrong. The whole point of the Usher family’s endeavors has been to save and preserve the civilization we took thousands of years to build, and they succeeded. They weren’t alone, of course, but there was no one more committed than they were to the cause. The old norms still apply—and so they should, since we had to fight so hard to preserve them. Rowland should have been here.”

Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who felt resentful that my hopes and expectations had been dashed. I’d moved on from there, though. The fact that my hopes of seeing Rowland had been relegated to the dead past was now a mere matter of circumstance. What was occupying my mind at present was the fact that Rosalind wanted to see me. She had fixed a rendezvous for four o’clock, at the Pyramid—although she naturally reserved the right to be late, if more pressing matters of duty intervened.

She undoubtedly wanted to ask me about Rowland—and I didn’t have anything to tell her. If there was one prospect in the world more terrifying than being summoned into the imperial presence to bear witness, it was that of being summoned into the presence knowing in advance that I was not in a position to satisfy her desire. I had nothing to tell her, and I knew that telling her nothing, however honest and accurate it might be, was not going to satisfy her.

“I wish I could keep you company,” Professor Crowthorne said, perhaps sincerely. “I’d quite like to take a look around the Palaces, and I’m sure that you could give me the next best thing to a family-guided tour, but I’m at the mercy of the train timetable, and I have to get back to the Great Wen tonight. I’ll have to walk to the station—there’s no prospect of a taxi, given the size of the crowd.”

I wondered whether he knew where the custom of referring to London as “the Great Wen” had originated, but I wasn’t about to ask him, or attempt any kind of discussion about the Romantic response to the Industrial Revolution, and I certainly wasn’t about to make any observation about Hell being a city much like London. He was right about the impossibility of getting a cab, though. There was already a considerable outflow through the gate, and the vehicles lying in wait had already been commandeered. We were in rural Devon, after all—the local taxi, while not exactly an endangered species, was something of a rara avis. At least half of the invitees were evidently familiar with Eden, and had no need to take advantage of Rosalind’s invitation to look around, so there was something of a mass exodus in progress..

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll walk with you, if you like—I’ll have plenty of time to get back here again before four, even if your train’s late.”

I meant no more than I said, but my mind was still a little numb. Was I secretly harboring an intention to hop on the London train with him, in order to pick up a northbound connection from Bristol before nightfall?—so secretly that I dared not even confess it to myself. Perhaps. After all, I had the same excuse as he did. By the time I had seen Rosalind at four, it wouldn’t be possible for me to get all the way back to Lancaster by train; I’d have to stay overnight, in Bristol or Birmingham if not in Exeter. I too was at the mercy of the timetable—but there had been no possibility of saying that to Rosalind’s face while I was in a handshaking queue, so the only possibility I had of acting on temptation was to slip away quietly, and simply not turn up to the abruptly-scheduled meeting. Rosalind could hardly deem that a terrible sin, given that her own son had failed to turn up to his twin sister’s funeral, of which he must have been given adequate notice.

The professor was obviously not averse to the idea having company on the walk, we set off together—but as we approached the gate, I saw the security men exchange glances. They were inside the gates, now, bidding polite farewells to the exiting crowd. In imitation of their employer, they did indeed bid Professor Crowthorne a polite farewell, and thanked him warmly for coming. To me, however, the man in charge said: “Rosalind would prefer it if you would remain in the grounds, Mr. Bell.”

Even her Praetorian Guard referred to her by her given name, and not as “Ms. Usher.”

That was all that was said—there was no vestige of a threat. I could not imagine that any of the burly men would physically retrain me if I insisted on leaving, even if I didn’t tell them that I intended to come straight back after seeing the professor off. The simple fact was, however, that “Rosalind would prefer it if I would remain in the grounds,” and they could not imagine that anyone in the world would not want to comply with Rosalind’s preferences, today of all days.

The professor certainly couldn’t imagine it. “It’s perfectly all right, Peter,” he assured me. “I really don’t mind walking on my own. It was good to see you again. We really must make more effort to keep in touch. Occasions like this serve as a salutary reminder of the need to maintain contacts, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I said, “they certainly do.”

I let him walk away, while I turned back, a prisoner of my error. I shouldn’t have come—but I had, and now I was trapped. Now I had to face up to Rosalind, unarmed.