CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I sat with the body for a couple of minutes, having no idea what to do next. I didn’t call Adam and Eve. Eventually, I picked up my phone and did the only thing I could—not in the sense that it was the only thing that was theoretically possible, but in the sense that it was the only action of which I was capable, at the time. It was the only action that would let me off the hook.

I called Rosalind.

“It’s Peter Bell the Third,” I told her answer-AI, although she would have knew that perfectly well, as my caller ID would be automatically displayed and she’d be able to see my face when she played back the message. “Rowland’s dead. I’m sorry. He had some kind of fit—I think the proximal cause of death might be a cerebral hemorrhage, but it was probably brought on by an anomalous reaction to Aether, caused by some kind of somatic modification he made to his brain ten years ago. An autopsy will probably clarify the matter.”

She returned the call within two minutes. She didn’t curse me. She hadn’t even gone pale. It was almost as if she had been expecting it—as she probably almost had. She, after all, was probably the only one who knew exactly how Magdalen had died, and probably had her own secet ideas about exactly how the responsibility for her death had to be divided up.

“How long ago?” she asked.

“Five minutes…maybe ten, by now. No more than twenty.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said. “You’ll have to connect the body to all the appropriate machinery, for the medical analyses, but I’ll take care of the legal formalities en route. I’ll seal this connection, but you’ll have to put an access code into his system. Can you do that?”

“Yes,”

“Is he in bed?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You do have nanoprobe equipment and scanners on hand, don’t you? He has, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Once the hook-ups are in place and I’m in control of his system, you can leave everything to me. It’s about eight p.m. there now, yes?”

“Just after. That makes it midnight where you are?”

“Just after,” she confirmed. “It’ll probably be late afternoon tomorrow, at the earliest, by the time I can get there, even though I’ll gain four hours in flight—a long wait, I fear. Thanks for calling right away. You did the right thing.”

Mother Nature might have been able to match Rosalind for creativity, but she’d never had that kind of organizational flair.

I had to tell Adam and Eve what had happened in order to send Adam in search of the various medical apparatus needed to hook the body up to the house’s systems and launch the automatic autopsy. Giving control of the house’s systems to Rosalind was easier.

Adam and Eve took the news hard. Adam checked Rowland’s body very carefully for signs of life, just in case, but found none.

Finding Eve’s alarm and grief harder to bear than my own, I left her to sit with the body while the post-mortem examination was carried out, although I made sure that Adam was able to operate the scanner before leaving them to it.

I made my way back to the study first, where I sat at the terminal for a while, monitoring Rosalind’s operations. She seemed to be handling “the legal formalities” with ruthless efficiency, but I didn’t suppose she was doing it all personally. Rosalind knew how to delegate. The only thing I decanted for my own use was a three-dimensional map of the house, but I didn’t put it to immediate use. I tucked it away for future reference. I did locate and check out Rowland’s own copy of his last will and testament, which confirmed that I was now the owner of the House of Usher—or would be, once the will had gone through probate.

The will requested burial of the body beneath the house, and the subsequent recycling of its organic material by the house’s systems. That wouldn’t have been legal in England, but this was Venezuela, and a region of that crippled nation beyond the reach of any surviving law. I didn’t suppose that Rosalind would be happy about it, but I decided that I would have to insist if she tried to object, because that was what Rowland would have wanted me to do—and I didn’t want to start debating with myself, as yet, as to exactly how far I was or wasn’t prepared to go in doing what he wanted me to do.

It was past eleven when I finally went back to Adam and Eve, to make sure that they knew that Rosalind was handling everything, and that they mustn’t do anything but wait. Then I asked Adam to dim the house lights and returned to my own room. Midnight had gone by the time I got into bed, but my inner sense of time seemed to have become confused, and I didn’t begin to feel tired until I actually made a conscious decision to go to sleep.

Then, fatigue suddenly swept over me like a wave. I wondered if that was how Rowland had felt in the wake of his brain-tempering. I wasn’t tempted to go looking for his Aether supply, though. I wanted to go to sleep.

With darkness and fatigue, though, came an inevitable relaxation of reason, and when I did go to sleep, my self-control—so carefully maintained during the last few hours by the iron grip of determined consciousness—was banished. I dreamt more nightmarishly than I had done on any previous night of my life, and my dreams were pure Eddie Poe.

I dreamt that I buried Rowland not in his own house but in the other House of Usher—the haunted purgatory of Romantic fantasy. Our long journey to the grave was through rotting passages weeping with cold slime, lit only by smoky torches whose flames were angry red. I dragged his coffin behind me, supporting only one end, while the other slid through the worm-infested mud, crushing insect-larvae by the score. The larvae screamed, but very faintly. I imagined that Rowland’s dead lips were speaking to me as we went, mocking my slowness.

“Trains of thought need tracks,” he told me. “Where are your tracks now, Peter? You’ll never get to where you need to be at this rate.”

“For the love of God, Rowland!” I complained. I felt thirsty.

That was bad enough, but, after I had immured my one and only friend in a vault behind a great metal door, I remained anchored to the spot, listening for an eternity, waiting for the sounds that I knew would come—the sound of the body risen from its rest, its fingers tapping and scratching at the door, the sound of its heart, beating once again more powerfully than before.

Inevitably—probably, there was no real lapse of time, but simply an aching false consciousness of time passed—the sounds began. The heartbeat taunted my soul with echoes of dread and anguish, which reverberated in my being until I felt myself literally driven insane, and howled at myself in the fury of my hallucination: “Madman! Madman! Madman!”

Then I woke in a cold sweat, feeling exceedingly thirsty.

And I heard, outside the door of my chamber, a faint tapping and scratching.

For a moment, I convinced myself that I was still asleep, and struggled manfully to wake. Then I could deny my senses no longer, and knew that the sound was real.

I dragged myself from my bed, feeling very heavy, as if my body required an agony of effort in order to move at all. I stumbled to the door, and opened it, at first by the merest crack and then—in consequence of what I saw—much wider.

There in the faintly-lit corridor, prostrate at my feet, one hand still groping for the door, was what seemed to be a teenage girl.

I knew, of course, that she was not human. How many human genes were in her—Magdalen Usher’s genes, taken from the tissue-cultures that had outlived their source—I could not guess, but I knew that she was a sham, a phantasm, no more human than the maggots that would soon consume Rowland Usher’s body…and one day, no doubt, my own.

She didn’t look like Magdalen, as I remembered my one and only true love from her teenage years. She didn’t look fully or convincingly human, even in the dim light of the corridor. But she was, as Rowland had promised, beautiful. Hers was not the beauty of a butterfly, or a dragonfly, or a colored beetle; it was no kind of beauty that any species of insect had ever manifested before, and it was not, strictly speaking, human beauty—but she was beautiful, in a way of her own that seemed poignant and pathetic. She was the kind of creature, undoubtedly, that a human might love…if not, perhaps, a human like me. To me, she was a pitiful creature, and it was pity that moved me to respond to her presence. I remembered what Rowland had said about such creatures not living long

Some insect imagoes, I knew, emerge from their pupae without digestive systems, unable to nourish themselves; they exist only to exchange genes in the physiological ritual of sexual intercourse, and then to die. These creatures of Rowland’s did not even have reproductive organs inside them…yet. They existed neither to eat nor to breed, being equipped only with the very minimum of a behavioral repertoire, in order to serve their maker’s transitory purpose. That purpose still had a long way to go before it would be properly focused. For now, Rowland’s race of New Eves existed purely and simply to assist him in the work of their continued improvement, the ambition of their ultimate perfection. For now, they were merely rough sketches of their ultimate descendants, with tiny random tumors in their unnecessarily voluminous chitinous skulls, which had not yet found the trick of becoming embryonic brains, let alone of actually thinking.

And yet, when I took the pitiful creature in my arms, she was able to cling to me and caress me, to soothe as well as to be soothed. That might have been the entirety of her emotional existence, but it was not negligible. Like a mayfly, she had been born with only a short time to live, innocent and ignorant of time, space and the world at large. Her universe was the House of Usher, and her journey of exploration along the spiral corridor had been the only one she would ever make.

I could only hope that she was passing her brief existence in a kind of bliss, and that I was helping to sustain that absence of terror, expectation and desire.

I was fully awake now, and although I had been startled and a little appalled, I was able to react in a rational manner. I picked the poor creature up and carried her to my bed, where I stroked her, gently

She died before morning.

When I had got dressed, I consulted the map I had decanted on to my handset, and carried her body down the caverns deep underground. They were, indeed, a long way down, but they were still within the living walls of the growing manse, in whose nooks and crannies the free-living maggots pupated.

Down there I saw rank after rank of grey pupae, shaped like the sarcophagi in which the Egyptians entombed their mummified dead. I watched the hatching of a few of the humanoid ephemerae, and studied the phases of their brief life-cycle by inspecting individuals of different ages.

They clustered around me—not driven by curiosity or the hope of caresses, in my judgment, but simply by some instinct of gregariousness. They probably could not tell that I was not one of them, in spite of my stature, age and sex. They had beautiful eyes—eyes, Rowland had told me, had been easy to fake—but they had no idea what they were seeing. They were not blind, but they were not conscious either, so the sensory information they collected either vanished into a void or deployed its effects at a far more basic level than consciousness, or even emotion.

They did not need me to stay with them—those aspects of Rowland’s work that had demanded continual and relentless attention were concerned with their further evolution, not their mundane lives—but I did stay with them, for most of the morning. I found their presence comforting.

It was not until Rosalind called me and told me that her flight had landed, and that she was on her way to board a chartered boat, that I went back up to the top of the house, to see Adam and Eve. The three of us grieved for a while. Once the distant post-mortem had been completed, Eve had washed the body and replaced the unclean bedding. The body had been arranged in a resting position. Decay had not yet made measurable progress; that part of the house was sterile.

I read the autopsy results. Rowland had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, apparently occasioned by an anomalous interaction between Aether—the official report gave the full chemical name and formula rather than the familiar term—and a cluster of transformed cells in a localized area of the cerebrum.

The report did not say so, but I knew that the area in question was the one associated with rational and scientific thought…except, of course, that, like genes, brain-cells never do just one thing. You can’t enhance one propensity without affecting others. Nature is the Mother of improvisation; there’s always a trade-off on the road of least resistance, and even when you get what you wanted, you get screwed.

Adam asked me what would happen, now. He meant to him and Eve. I told him that I didn’t know, yet—that I would have to talk to Rosalind before making any firm decisions—but that he need have no fear. For as long as he and Eve were prepared to tend to the house, they would be paid to do so. If they no longer wanted to do it, they would be given generous assistance to settle elsewhere.

Adam told me that he didn’t want to leave the house. Eve agreed with him. It was their home, their refuge.

Adam and I went down to meet Rosalind’s boat when it approached the harbor. She wasn’t alone, of course; she had brought four men with her—all drones, I could not help thinking, although I knew that they wouldn’t be idle, and I recognized one of them as her petty Saint Peter, who had let me in but wouldn’t let me out again while manning the gates of Eden. She left the hirelings to follow orders without direct supervision, though, when she accompanied me to inspect the body of her only son. She didn’t touch the body. She simply stood and looked at it, sorrowfully.

“You expected this,” I said, accusatively. “You knew something like this was going to happen.”

“No I didn’t, Peter,” she said, flatly. “I feared that it might—but I sent you here in the hope that you might somehow be able to prevent it from happening. It’s not your fault that you couldn’t. If anyone is at fault, it’s me, because I couldn’t.”

“You should have told me exactly how Magdalen died.”

“How could I, Peter? How could I, when I don’t even know myself? I know that she poisoned herself, by taking Aether. I tried to stop her, to substitute something more subtle, but she was mirroring what Rowland was doing. She knew that she didn’t need to—that he had given her a placebo instead of the loaded vectors—but she couldn’t help it. Whatever was driving her was operating below the level of consciousness, immune to any effort of will that she or I could make. I’ve done my damnedest to figure out the chemistry of such effects—to figure out how subconscious psychtotropics actually work—but even the resources of the Hive couldn’t solve the problem in time to help her.

“What was I supposed to tell you, Peter—that she was killed by the placebo effect? I told you what I could: that she was poisoned, that it probably wasn’t an accident, and that it definitely wasn’t murder. I wasn’t even certain of that…but I was worried about Rowland. I thought his arrogance might save him—that even though Magdalen’s mirroring of his symptoms had killed her, he might simply be too self-satisfied to surrender to mortality in the same way—but I was wrong about that. I also hoped that your presence might help him, even though it couldn’t have helped Magdalen, because you were his friend. That didn’t work out either. It’s not your fault that it didn’t, though, any more than it’s his.”

It was grief talking. Not that she wasn’t telling the truth, but she wouldn’t have gone on at such length if she hadn’t just suffered the double blow of losing her twins. She certainly wouldn’t have framed so many of her comments as questions. If she’d been herself—the Queen Bee—she’d just have given me the facts…but the Queen Bee was just an act. The Queen Bee was a pose she’d learned to strike, in order to compensate for the side-effects of her scientific genius, the forcefulness of her rational objectivity.

“Rowland blamed himself for Magdalen’s death,” I told her.

“Of course he did,” Rosalind retorted. “We all blamed ourselves, reveling in our supposed guilt, masochistic idiots that we are.”

She didn’t mean that we were idiots who just happened to have a masochistic streak. She meant that the mocking masochism that sometimes welled up from beneath the conscious levels of our minds—from beneath our science—made idiocy of our genius, in a spirit of objective irony.

“Rowland must have known about the danger,” I told her. “He must have taken scans, even if he didn’t transmit them for analysis by anyone else—but he was in denial. Even though he was in a hurry to give me the keys to his secret, he was still in denial. It wasn’t suicide, but there was a certain amount of contributory negligence involved. I came too late. A year ago, perhaps even six months, I might have been able to make a difference…but I left it too late.”

“He left it too late,” Rosalind said. “He could have invited you at any time, and you’d have come—like a shot. You had to wait for an excuse to demand an invitation—for Magdalen to die.”

“He left me the house, you know—he wants me to continue his work.”

“I know. I knew before I asked you to come. He couldn’t keep that a secret, and didn’t even try.”

“Do you intend to challenge the will?”

Rosalind fixed me with her sky-blue eyes, but she didn’t attempt to reach out to me. “Why would I do that?” she said. “He was perfectly sane when he made the will, wasn’t he?”

I didn’t answer that, but she took my silence for assent.

“The Hive doesn’t need his money,” she went on, “and as for his work…if he was prepared to trust you with it, so am I. You needn’t cut yourself off the way he did though. If you want our collaboration, our help…or merely someone to talk to, who understands….”

Again, I said nothing, but this time, she took it as evidence of doubt.

“I do understand,” she told me. “They didn’t think I could, either of them—but I’m their mother. I understood them far better than they knew, far better than they hoped.”

I didn’t contradict her.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

To start with, I took her into the underworld, so that she could see with her own eyes what Rowland had wrought, and what it was that he wanted me to continue on his behalf. I told him what he had said to me before he died, including his Romantic flight of fancy.

“They’re beautiful,” she said, of the ephemerae. They clustered round the two of us, reaching out to us and touching us. I was slightly surprised to see that Rosalind didn’t seem to mind their touch at all, and certainly didn’t flinch from it. She looked into their empty eyes frankly. Nor was that part of her Queen Bee pose; she really didn’t mind. Perhaps, I thought, we had more in common than I’d previously imagined.

“They’re modeled on Magdalen,” I told her.

“I can see that,” she said. “What other model could they possibly have used? Did you expect me to be horrified, Peter? I’m a scientist, like you. Are you horrified?”

“No,” I admitted—but I was still surprised at myself.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked, again. I saw that, in her turn, she was reaching out to the ephemerae, as I was, and returning their unthinking caresses.

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I have my own work, my own life, in Lancaster.”

“Do you?” she countered. “What happened when the word got around the university that you were coming out here?”

“People started ringing up to beg me to bring them with me…have you been bugging my phone?”

“Of course not. They rang me too, begging me to intercede on their behalf—I didn’t return the calls, obviously. If you need help, there won’t be any lack of it. I’ll send you a couple of my daughters if you like—but you mustn’t fall in love with any of them; there wouldn’t be any future in it.” She didn’t realize how insulting the final comment was.

“Do you want me to carry on where Rowland left off?” I asked, slightly incredulously.

“What I want doesn’t come into it,” she said. “That’s what he wanted. The question I asked, if you need me to repeat it, was what you want to do.”

“I don’t know,” I repeated.

“What you need to remember, Peter,” she said, “is that if our fundamental impulses are generated somewhere in the dark depths of the brain, beyond the reach of consciousness and rational planning, ever vulnerable to psychotropic agents of which we have no knowledge, let alone understanding, then it’s our manifest duty to fight them, to find a way to conquer them and subject them to the empire of reason. However hard it is, we need to exert all the force that consciousness and science can muster. We can’t let Mother Nature win. If we can’t defeat her in ourselves, we owe it to those who come after us to make sure that they’re better armed than we are, so that they have a better chance of succeeding where we failed. That’s what being human ought to be about.”

“Not everyone would agree with you about that,” I said.

“Not everyone,” she agreed. “But you do, Peter, don’t you?”

I did. In spite of all the faults that my flesh was heir to, I could, and I did.