The Cassandra Complex (11 page)

He paused so she could prompt him, but she was still distracted by the temporary play of the unusual light as it filtered through the few portals left to it by Mouseworld’s architects. The pattern of the reflections that redirected the mellow beams into the corners of the vast room seemed quite amazing. Some of the compartments now had faces resembling rose-tinted lenses; others seemed to be ablaze with the glory of Armageddon.

The tenor of the conversation made it remarkably easy for Lisa to imagine Mouseworld as a human world writ small, its seething masses confused by all kinds of myths and apocalyptic imaginings. People fixated on dates had become particularly agitated in December 1999, and again in December 2000, but the lack of any outrageously peculiar event on the thirty-first of either month had only made them look even harder for signs of apocalypse in the everyday world, which continued on its stubborn course regardless of their hopes and fears. How many of them had seen, or even heard of, Mouseworld? How many had wondered whether the plague of people might be the mysterious Fourth Horseman of Revelation? Momentarily lost in these imaginings, Lisa had to bring herself back to earth with a bump in order to ask: “What others?”

“What of those new subspecies that hide their transgenic lights behind carefully placed smoke screens?” Chan continued seamlessly. “Are we so naive, you and I, that we take it for granted there are no mice in Mouseworld designed to model human factors whose problematic aspects are far more controversial than fatal diseases? Are there gay mice in Mouseworld? We suspect so—but you and I cannot pick them out, because they are closeted, carefully unlabeled by their investigators. Are there mice whose makers dare to hope they will be more intelligent than their common kin, mice whose makers hope they will be stronger than their common kin, mice whose makers hope they will far outlive their common kin? Yes, yes … undoubtedly. But which? The strangest thing about the H Block that lies at the very center of Mouseworld is that its society is subject to all kinds of
hidden hands
whose motives and methods are unclear. Is that not a telling mirror of the world in which we Uve? Is it not testimony to the true momentum of history, the fundamental paradoxically of progress?”

“This is a university, not some top-secret research establishment in the Arizona desert,” Lisa reminded him. “The people who are doing these experiments will publish the results in due course.”

“Will they?” Chan asked. “They feel strongly about it, for the most part—Morgan Miller more strongly than most—but the culture in which they operate is not merely more powerful than they are, but more powerful than they can imagine. The universities are already adopting, explicitly as well as implicitly, the same habits of confidentiality, the same obsessive interest in intellectual property, and the same blatant cupidity as their commercial rivals—and could not help so doing once they accepted the view that they were indeed
rivals
of the biotechnology companies. Yes, the H Block was planted in the dead center of Mouseworld, surrounded by the proud relic of an earlier age—but while the cities continue to pour forth a cataract of data open to everyone who cares to look, what do the H Blocks produce? A vast series of tentative trickles, whose multifariousness serves to conceal their incompleteness. Thus the esoteric future emerges from the exoteric cradle of the past.”

“In that sense,” Lisa observed, “the deeper analogy surely doesn’t go far enough. All the work in here is being carried out with the aid of research grants, except for the kind of stuff people like me are doing just for practice. It all has to be accounted for. There’s nothing
sinister
going on here. Compared with the real world, it’s a bit of a children’s playground, or a Utopian enclave.”

Chan smiled at that. “Of course it is,” he said. “It is a mirror of our dreams and ambitions rather than the ugly reality of the world as it is. Or should I say
your
dreams and ambitions? It is, after all, a thoroughly Western image.”

Although she knew little or nothing of Chan’s personal history, Lisa knew immediately what he meant. In China—which had recently reclaimed Hong Kong from its former colonial masters—the population problem was not being left alone to find its own solution. There, if nowhere else, was a government that was not content to hope that the crisis would somehow be averted, or that the aftermath of the human depopulation crisis would follow the pattern now set by the mice of Rome and London, Paris and New York. China was the nation that had weathered more population crises in its own history than any other, and perhaps the only one whose leaders had really learned anything from the bitter experiences of their forebears. But Chan Kwai Keung was not in Hong Kong now. He was in England, where prosperity obscured all anxiety about a population whose increase had not yet been eliminated by the continual decline in the birth rate. In England, the most common view was that the population explosion was a “Third World problem” that did not apply to the developed nations, where women were marrying later and an increasing number were choosing not to marry at all.

Lisa herself had no intention of marrying or of having children. She could not imagine why so many women became broody, and she fervently hoped that no such misfortune would ever befall her—although even she was sometimes disposed to wonder whether this was evidence of something lacking in herself, some element of instinct lost to casual mutation.
How many of us
, she wondered,
are nature’s knockout mice
—
and what, if so, are we modeling? The spectrum of human potential, or the range of potential folly?

“The architects seem to have taken as much care to isolate London, Paris, Rome, and New York from the rest of Mouseworld as our own governments have taken to isolate West from East and North from South,” Lisa agreed, “but at the end of the day, all the mice in the world have common problems. The ecosphere has its boundaries, but we all draw on the same resources and we all piss into the same pond. If the population boom does turn to a catastrophic collapse, it will affect all of us. No matter how we guard our individual cages, we’ll all go down together when we go.”

“There you are,” said Chan lightly. “If we only look with educated eyes, we can see all manner of parables in this awesome confusion. Now that we have penetrated the darkest secrets of DNA, we are in some danger of forgetting that the actual actors in the world’s drama are not disembodied genes, but firmly embodied organisms. Forensic science may deal almost exclusively in the future with the DNA extracted from smears and stains, but the criminals it convicts will all be whole organisms. Their genes may betray them, but cannot accurately define them.”

“That’s very good,” Lisa said, meaning the compliment sincerely. “This place is by no means short of would-be philosophers, but you’re the real thing, aren’t you?”

“Very much so,” he assured her. “So is Morgan Miller, in his own contradictory way. And so are you, if I may say so, despite your strange ambition.”

“I like the idea of solving vexatious problems,” she told him. “I like the idea of catching evildoers.”

“Common criminals will always get caught,” Chan told her, his voice retreating to a whisper and taking on an unaccountable chill, “but most evildoers, alas, go unrecognized and unchallenged. Perhaps it would be different if we were able to recognize the evils extrapolated in our own actions, but we are little better than mice as natural mathematicians—or, for that matter, as natural moralists.”

“Maybe,” said Lisa, still responding to his lightly veiled criticism of her chosen vocation, “but we have to do what we can, don’t we?”

“We should,” he agreed as the light of the setting sun added a hint of flame to his polished flesh, “and perhaps we shall.”

PART TWO
The Ahasuerus Ambush

SEVEN

L
isa’s first interview with Peter Grimmett Smith took place in a ground-floor seminar room. The setting would have seemed incongruous in any case, but it happened to be a room in which she had once chaired population-dynamics seminars for Morgan Miller. It had been redecorated and refurbished long ago, but the smart bio-plastic on the floor bore exactly the same pattern as the dumb vinyl that it had replaced, and it was easy enough for her mind’s eye to substitute a lumbering TV-and-video and a primitive OHP for the station electroepidiascope that had replaced them.

The chairs were very different, being tastefully upholstered in a smart fabric whose soft texture and maroon hue could hardly have contrasted more strongly with the old gray-plastic monstrosities, but at the end of the day, a chair was just a chair: something to sit on. The desk across whose teak-finish surface she faced the man from the Ministry of Defence was likewise just a desk, similar to any number of desks that had formed barriers between her and the world during years past.

Smith looked almost as tired as Lisa felt, although he, like Mike Grundy and Judith Kenna, must have had the opportunity to get
some
sleep before the alarm bells began ringing. The apparent tiredness took the edge off his interrogative manner. “For form’s sake, Dr. Friemann,” he said, “I have to ask you whether there’s a possibility that the people who ransacked your apartment early this morning could have found any classified material.” He wasn’t quite as good-looking at close range, and the harsh light of the seminar room exposed every sign of his age.

“There was nothing classified for them to find,” Lisa assured him truthfully. “Nothing in the least sensitive, in fact. Everything work-related stays at work, in the office or the lab.”

Smith nodded. Lisa was reasonably certain that he believed her; even Judith Kenna had to concede that she had a hard-won reputation for method, discipline, and good organization. “Do you have
any
idea of what these people might have been looking for?” he asked. He gave the impression that he was asking again purely for form’s sake, knowing exactly what the answer would be—but she knew it might be a ploy, to set her at ease while he developed his suspicions more subtly.

“I’m not sure that they were looking for anything,” she said pensively. “They may have been putting on a show. It’s possible that the real purpose of their visit was to leave that stupid message on my door.”

She noticed the ghost of a smile on the MOD man’s face. “Why would they do that?” he asked.

“I think they might have been trying to discredit me,” she said. “Perhaps they think that I’m the most likely person to figure out what’s going on here, because I probably know Morgan Miller better than anyone else in the world does and I certainly care more about him than anyone else in the world does. I think they wanted to set things up so the people in charge of the investigation wouldn’t entirely trust me and might decide to keep me on the sidelines just in case. Have they succeeded?”

“They might have,” Smith told her with apparent frankness, “if the circumstances hadn’t been quite so awkward.”

Lisa raised her eyebrows, waiting for an explanation, but all Smith said was: “Considering your record, Chief Inspector Kenna doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion of your abilities.”

“I can’t help that,” Lisa said. “It’s what we twentieth-century leftovers used to call ‘a clash of personalities.’ Does she say I can’t be trusted?”

Smith shook his head. “Not at all. She did make some vague observations about lack of objectivity—something about it not being helpful to be so closely involved—and obsolescence of expertise. I got the impression that obsolescence of expertise might be one of her favorite phrases.” He made a slight gesture with his right hand, intended to draw attention to the gray hair that an unwary youth cultist might have taken as a symptom of his own impending obsolescence.

“I strongly disagree about the helpfulness of my past involvement with Morgan Miller,” Lisa said flatly.

“Good,” Smith said. “As for the other thing… well, I find myself confronted with a desperate shortage of up-to-date expertise. Every biologist we had on call is working full time on the emergency. I need an adviser who knows her way around Morgan Miller’s field, and there’s at least a possibility that expertise as out of date as his will be the most useful kind. In brief, Dr. Friemann, I need your help far too desperately to worry too much about the fact that someone on the other side took time out to write Traitor’ on your door. Time is pressing. Whatever reason they had for snatching Miller, we have to get him back quickly if we can, and we have to take whatever action may be necessary if we can’t. Are you willing to be seconded to my unit?”

“Yes,” she said, “I certainly am.”

Lisa hadn’t expected it to be quite as easy as that. She guessed it wasn’t just Peter Grimmett Smith who had found himself short of resources; his employers probably thought they were scraping the bottom of the barrel by appointing him to investigate. From the viewpoint of the MOD, this was a minor distraction—a nuisance they would have been glad to leave alone, had they only dared.

On the other hand, she couldn’t let his willingness to take her aboard lull her into a false sense of security. The fact that he needed her didn’t mean that he trusted her.

“In that case,” Smith said, “I have to impress upon you that everything that passes between us from this moment on is confidential. You don’t repeat it—not even to Chief Inspector Kenna or Detective Inspector Grundy. Is that clear?”

“As crystal,” she said. “What have you got that Kenna hasn’t?”

He nodded, presumably approving her businesslike attitude. “We commandeered Miller’s phone records,” he said. “Two calls leaped out screaming—both made within the last week, both to institutions he’d never contacted before, both asking for appointments to visit. And before you ask—no, we didn’t have his phone tapped. He put a tape on the calls himself.”

That wasn’t easy to believe.
“Morgan
set a tape to record his own phone calls?”