Nature's Shift by Brian Stableford Read Free Book Online Page B

were all being grown under bell-jars, with networks of rubber tubing to siphon off the product for concentration and testing. The plants that didn’t have that double layer of insulation were guaranteed harmless, and the fact that each and every species was accompanied in the grounds of its own palace by its specialist pollinator didn’t create any risk of being stung. The first thing that Roderick the Great had done in producing new bee species by the score had been to take away their weaponry. His collaborators had not been able to do the same with the wasp species they had engineered as specialist predators, but wasps were becoming rare now, at least in England, having done their designated jobs so efficiently as to reduce the pest populations they were attacking to minimum reproductive level.
    â€œMinimum reproductive level” was another of Roderick’s catch-phrases. “Extinction” was not merely a dirty word nowadays but a dirty concept; he had never seen it as part of his mission to drive any organism to extinction—merely to render those that were inconvenient to human need and human comfort rare and unobtrusive. The effects of the ecocatastrophe had, of course, resulted in a dramatic loss of biodiversity in every stratum of the ecosphere, but Roderick had wanted to keep his hands clean in that respect, and he could legitimately claim that the increase in biodiversity prompted by the application of his methods had offered considerable compensation for Nature’s slaughter.
    All in all, though, the insects had come through the holocaust reasonably well. Even species whose extinction would not have raised a single tear had pulled through. Bedbugs and various species of human louse still survived—but not in the beds or on the heads of honest citizens of the British Republic…or, for that matter, dishonest ones.
    I was able to take an interest in the plants, of course; I would have been able to do that even if they had simply been pretty and nicely-perfumed, but I still had some expertise in flower design left over from my days at university, so I was better able than any mere gawker to appreciate the effort that was on display in Rosalind’s showcases and experimental plots. From the viewpoint of her current thinking, everything on public display was presumably old hat to a greater or lesser degree, but innovation moved so rapidly in the Hive of Industry that even material that Rosalind had recently cast aside as passé still seemed state-of-the-art to a specialist in marine algae.
    I was impressed by the sexiness of the flowers, and not because the bell-jars containing those engineered to produce synthetic pheromones were leaking. The sexiness of flowers had long been one of Rosalind’s preoccupations, and she had not been immune to educative zeal herself in the days when I had visited Eden with Rowland. She it was, in person, who had lectured me on the historical ramifications of the strange controversy that the great Linnaeus had caused by electing, on rational grounds, to make the reproductive organs of plants the basis for his classification—a decision that some censorious individuals had condemned as obscene. Of course, she had dutifully pointed out, the cause of immodest rationality had not been helped by the fact that writers like Thomas Stretser had immediately co-opted the vocabulary of Linnaean botany for use as a euphemistic code for description of the functioning of the human genitalia, in such classics of perverse pornography as The Natural History of the Frutex Vulvaria; or, Flowering Shrub and Arbor Vitae; or, The Natural History of the Tree of Life, both by-lined Philogynes Clitorides. Rosalind owned illustrated editions of both texts, as well as first editions of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden , including his poetic account of “The Loves of the Plants,” and Sir William Jones’s translation of the floral-erotic Indian epic