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 were all kids back then—Rosalind left a long gap after the first two, presumably to give her time to see how the experiment was working out. The older ones will have grown up now, and even the little ones I met will be teenagers. It’s ten years since I’ve seen any of them—they wouldn’t remember me.”
“I’m surprised by that…that you didn’t keep in touch with the family,” the professor ventured, probing as subtly as he could, because he knew that he was on sensitive ground.
“I shouldn’t have let things slide,” I admitted. “I wish that Magdalen had taken the trouble to call me, though, if…when…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. If, or when Magdalen had decided to kill herself, she probably hadn’t called anyone. I wasn’t the only one she hadn’t turned to in extremis.
“You were...quite fond of her, though, back then?”
“Yes,” I confirmed, through teeth that were only slightly gritted, “quite fond.”
He knew when a subject had to be dropped, and returned to safer ground. “I thought that Roland would make an insect man back then,” he said, settling back into his rut, in terms of his phraseology as well as his subject-matter. “In spite of all the flirtations with strange sidelines, I thought he’d eventually take up where Roderick had left off, Rosalind having gone off at something of a tangent.”
“According to the Usher family doctrine,” I said, only a trifle sarcastically, “there’s no such thing as an insect man per se. In Roderick the Great’s vocabulary, insects are components of dedicated symbiotic partnerships; their early evolution took place in harness with the evolution of flowering plants, as a complex pas de deux. In Usher mythology, an insect’s place is in the bosom of a flower, trading its services as a pollen-distributor for nectar.”
“You’re being flippant,” he said. “That might apply, albeit loosely, to bees, but insects are extraordinarily versatile, ecologically speaking—almost as versatile as worms. Only a tiny minority are involved in pollination, or any other kind of symbiosis, and then only as imagoes.”
“That was the past, Professor,” I reminded him. “The Ushers are looking to the future. From now on…from fifty years ago, in fact…the fate of insects is to be whatever the Hive of Industry wants them to be. Pests out, symbiotes in, no neutrals. Anyway, insects were never all that versatile. There might still be hundreds of thousands of beetle species left, out of the pre-Crash millions, but they’re all just beetles. The insects never contrived to recolonize the sea in the way that reptiles, mammals and birds did. There aren’t any insects in my little corner of creation—yet.”
“You’re still being flippant,” was Professor Crowthorne’s expert judgment. Gallantly, he added: “And why not? We take ourselves and our work too seriously, sometimes—and in the face of tragedy, of matters that we can’t control, no matter how clever we might be as biotechnicians, what psychological weapons do we have, except for a refusal not to take things too seriously? You have to laugh or you’d cry—isn’t that what they say up there in Lancashire.”
His idea of northern parlance had obviously been forged by historical dramas on TV, but he meant well.
“So it’s rumored,” I agreed.
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
