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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.”
    â€œYou’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.”
    â€œThat 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.”
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œSo 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