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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.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œRowland 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.”
    â€œArrogance 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.
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œRosalind 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.”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI 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 .
    â€œYou were...quite fond of her, though, back then?”
    â€œYes,” 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.”
    â€œAccording to the Usher family doctrine,” I