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 and most straightforward approach was, however a matter of producing specialist pollinators that were immune to the particular trouble in question, either by modifying the existing specialists or producing substitutes, whether by selective breeding or direct genetic manipulation.
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
