Nature's Shift Read Free Page B

required something more than boldness to single out the Orinoco delta when Rowland had taken himself off there, and I doubted that he had a neighbor within two hundred miles, as yet, no matter how rapidly the nation’s general reconstruction was proceeding in the west and along the Colombian border. The two great industries that had sustained the nation’s economy, after a fashion, before the Crash—fossil oil and cocaine—were both as dead as the dodo. Genetic engineering had replaced them both, fossil oil with cane oil and kelp oil, and cocaine with a whole generation of stimulant drugs, by far the most fashionable of which was Aether. The surviving Venezuelans could only look with envious eyes at such neighbors as Trinidad and Brazil, which—for different reasons—had come through the collapse in much better economic shape.
    â€œNot that I’ve seen anything more of Magdalen in recent years,” Professor Crowthorne added. “You must have kept in touch with her?”
    â€œI’m afraid not,” I said. “We never really got back in touch, after she returned from Venezuela. I thought she might want to talk to me about it…about leaving Rowland behind, that is…and I kept expecting her to call, but somehow, it didn’t seem appropriate for me to call her. Maybe we were both expecting the other to make the first move, both leaving it to the other—silly, I suppose. But I didn’t feel that I could, in the circumstances, and months became years, and now….”
    Now, it was too late, but I couldn’t quite pronounce the words. The professor came to my rescue. “Time flies, alas,” he said. “For everyone, of course—but especially for scientists, I think. The scientific mind has to be adept at concentration, dedicated in focus, inexhaustibly patient…and all of that easily becomes a matter of shutting other people out, a means of obsession.” He sighed, then added: “A tragic business, this. Now that we’re supposed to be able to live for hundreds of years…not that anyone’s proven it yet…it seems a terrible shock when someone dies so young.”
    The cautionary interjection was typical of him. He had a more intense interest in the possibility that humans might now be able to live for hundreds of years, by courtesy of advanced internal technology, than most people, having been born into an era in which centenarians were exceedingly rare and the Crash was making certain that even the citizens of Fortress Britain had less than a fifty-fifty chance of reaching their natural lifespan. Had there not been such sweeping changes in his lifetime, he might now be confronting the possibility of imminent death himself, but he had no way of knowing, at the dawn of the New Era, how long he might endure…or what new problems that endurance might throw up. His remark about the lack of proof wasn’t just a reflection of his uneasy experiences during the tail end of the ecocatastrophe, though. He was by nature a cautious person, unprepared go take anything on trust that was as yet untested by time and experience.
    Although I assumed that the primary reason for his refusal of any attempt to look younger had been the ridiculousness that most such cosmetic endeavors conferred on their victims, I suspected that Professor J. V. Crowthorne actually liked the venerable look, feeling that it was not only suited to his status as a university teacher but to his personality. Some people are born to peak at twenty-one, and every sign of aging they accumulate is an insult to their beautiful identity, but some are born to peak in advanced maturity, and moderate aging befits the image of their essential wisdom. He was one of the latter.
    I was a university teacher myself too, now, but I calculated on keeping my youthful appearance for a long time yet, even though beauty was definitely not my strong suit. By the time I reached