Nature's Shift Read Free

turned resolutely backwards.
    To me, the statement made by the colored marquee was one of raging against the dying of the light—but I knew that I had to be careful of seeing it through the lens of my own imaginative inclinations. Rowland had often criticized me for “thinking in quotes,” deeming the habit slavish. He was not an admirer of poetry himself, least of all Romantic poetry, and had not reacted well when I had once referred to him, intending to pay him a compliment, as a “tyger” burning bright in the forests of the night, although he had mercifully failed to understand when I had once addressed him in a slightly less complimentary mood, as “Manfred.”
    There are, I know from experience, terminological purists who argue that glass-working is not, strictly speaking, gantzing, that label being—in their opinion—only applicable to processes of biological cementation that organize particulate matter. Because glass is a supercooled liquid rather than a agglomerated solid, the neobacteria responsible for its secretion and shaping have a distinctive biochemistry that is distinguished in several significant genomic and proteonomic ways from the kinds of gantzers that raise palaces from clay, granite or unrefined sand. I had never been that kind of purist, though, and had once taken a civil engineering course in company with Rowland, who thought that narrow definitions were almost as dangerous to mental flexibility as thinking in quotes. To our minds, the fact that “gantzing” was a derivative of a human surname rather than any kind of genetic terminology gave it a flexibility that fully entitled it to be applied to all kinds of modern building techniques, as laymen usually did. Leon Gantz had been a revolutionary, whose name was fully entitled to become legend and transcend pedantry; Roderick Usher’s name might well have done likewise, had it not already been legendary, in an entirely different context.
    That was why Roderick was usually known simply as Roderick, except when he was favored as Roderick the Great, and Rosalind simply as Rosalind, except when she was called the Queen Bee. The current House of Usher wanted nothing to do with a literary inheritance that was inseparable from the notion of falling, let alone the tacit notions of decadence and degeneracy.
    I could sympathize with their attitude, even though the unfortunate literary implication of my own name was far too esoteric to qualify as legendary, and I wasn’t entirely confident that my own existential trajectory was as diametrically opposed to the accidental precedent as the Ushers’ was. Roderick and Rosalind were all about rising, resurrection and resistance to decay and degeneration: they were movers and shakers in the post-Crash restoration and revivification of the ecosphere, the legacy of the new Eden, and the conquest of death. As for Rowland…well, the jury was still out on that one. Rosalind was understandably disappointed in his refusal to work for the Hive, but I retained the loyal conviction that he too was a biotechnological creator of genius, destined to stimulate the course and cause of human progress.
    The fact that Rowland had deliberately taken a flamboyantly independent course in his life and research, rather than following meekly in the tracks of his mother and grandfather, seemed to me to be essential to the prospect of his making an impact on the world. I thought that there was every reason to hope that the scope of his achievements would eventually turn out to be just as spectacular as those of his mother and grandfather. All three of them, at any rate, were firmly committed to the notion that upwards was the only way to go. In my view, though, the Earth is a sphere, and if you anchor your conceptual geometry to its center, every direction is up that leads to the light, and there’s nowhere to fall at all: the worst case scenario is inertia, and contentment with the