The Cassandra Complex (40 page)

“Dr. Friemann!”

The raised voice came from the corridor; it was loud and clear enough to dash any hope that its owner didn’t know exactly where they were, and the jolt it delivered to Lisa’s slowing heart restored the sharpness of her consciousness so completely as to make the situation seem surreal and hallucinatory.

Lisa immediately eased Helen Grundy to one side and went past her to the doorway. She took the gun with her, but she held it limply at arm’s length, pointed at the floor.

She was relieved to note, once she was outside the door, that Leland was alone, and that his own already-raised weapon was a dart gun like the one the Real Woman had been carrying in the parking lot—so alike, in fact, that it was presumably the same one.

Leland looked down at the dart gun apologetically. “Cheap Bulgarian crap,” he observed, “but it fires straight enough.”

“One copy only,” Lisa said immediately. “All the experimental data, plus a map of the retrovirus. You take it and you leave. You’ll have everything we have—and as far as anyone else is concerned, you weren’t even here.”

“I’m not worried about that,” he said. “Were you with them all along, or have you been turned?”

“Neither,” Lisa told him. “I’m just trying to make the best of a bad situation. You’ll have to trust my judgment that it’s a good deal. After all, I know what it is and you don’t—yet. It is worth fighting for—or against, depending on your point of view—so I’m not going to let you monopolize it. I’ll shoot you if necessary, and this isn’t a dart gun. If you take a copy and go, nobody gets hurt. It’s a good offer, Leland.”

“I’m probably a much better shot than you are,” Leland observed. “Even with a piece of crap like this. Don’t be fool enough to think you can shoot back before the drug takes effect. The dart would knock you over at this range. It might even kill you—do you know how many deaths are caused by supposedly nonlethal weaponry?”

“Of course I do,” said Lisa, “but the radfems have three more guns inside and they’re
real
marksmen. They consider me expendable. They know they’re cornered, but if you hang around too long, the police will be here, and getting all tangled up would be a really bad idea. One copy, and you leave. Go far and go fast.”

Leland shrugged. “Suits me,” he said. “I’m glad it’s you. I’m not sure I could trust anyone else not to hand me a blank.” If it was a threat, it was delicately couched.

Lisa, of course, had to trust Arachne West not to hand
her
a blank when she stuck her arm around the door. She passed the wafer she received to Leland without bothering to wonder.

“I’ll have to check it in the van,” Leland said as he took it. “If it looks okay, I’m gone. As you said, I was never even here.” He was already moving back into the subterranean maze. As he disappeared, he called back: “I’ll be in touch about that job.”

When Lisa stepped back inside, it was a resentful Helen Grundy who asked, “What job?”

“You cost me mine,” Lisa pointed out. “Maybe you ought to congratulate yourself for that. If I hadn’t been finished in the police force, I might not have been so nice when I phoned you or so pliable when I turned up here. Can Arachne assume that you’re back on board now that you have nothing left to rat her out with?”

“If that man works for a megacorp,” Mike Grundy’s ex-wife observed, “there’s no way anybody we can give it to will be able to work through the data before they do. They’ll have the weapon before we have a defense, and they’ll be halfway up the ladder to a workable emortality treatment before we’re clear of the first rung.”

“There is no workable emortality treatment, Helen,” Lisa informed her quietly. “Not by this route. If forty years of Morgan Miller’s ingenuity couldn’t get the merest glimpse of a fix, the resources of the vastest megacorp in the world won’t turn one up any time soon. He told Goldfarb and Geyer the simple truth. As a way of extending human life, it’s a dead end. Our personalities are formed by the closure of synapses, the withering of alternative pathways. Our memories are sculpted, not piled up. Rejuvenation of the brain wipes out everything but instinct. It’s a weapon, Helen—that and nothing more. It’s not the radfem Holy Grail. It’s just a poisoned chalice. I don’t believe anyone will ever use it, but I do believe that handing it over to Leland has further decreased the already slight probability. The people he works for are committed One Worlders. When they go to war—if they haven’t already—they’ll do so with that end in mind. They’ll use dirty tricks by the thousand, but I don’t believe they’ll use this one. It’s not compatible with their ultimate aim. If anyone else tries to use it, or threatens to use it, the Cabal will be better placed to put a stop to it than anyone else. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that’s the way I see it. Even so, I’ll be even happier if those copies Arachne is making are delivered into as many sympathetic hands as possible. A solid defense is the best foundation for any campaign.”

“Can you get a job for Mike too?” Helen Grundy asked, using up her last reserves of malice. “He’ll be needing one, won’t he?”

“He can look after himself,” Lisa assured her. “But if I can help him, I will—just as I’ll help Arachne. I’ll even put in a good word for you, if you want me to.”

“Finished,” said Arachne West. “Here’s yours. Can you stall the cops for us?”

“I expect I can keep them fully occupied for quite a while,” Lisa said as she accepted the proffered wafer and tucked it into her thigh pocket. “Go far. Go fast. Try to let me know how it works out for you.”

When they had gone, she put the gun down on the desk and moved over to open the door to Morgan’s cell.

He should have looked relieved when he saw that it was Lisa coming through the door, but he didn’t. He had expected her. He’d had faith in her—but it was too belated to win him any moral credit. In spite of everything they had done together, and everything they had been to one another, he had never had quite enough trust in her discretion, or in her devotion to the only real duty she had ever recognized.

“You’re a smug, selfish, secretive bastard,” she said as she went to help him up.

“And you,” he muttered reflexively. All things considered, it seemed preferable to a counteraccusation of contributory negligence.

EPILOGUE

W
hen Morgan and Chan had finally finished packing, Lisa went with them to take one last look at the ruins of Mouseworld. The room had been tidied up, as far as was possible, and all the roasted corpses had been removed, but the plastic slag that had once been feeding mechanisms, cleaning systems, ladders, and cage fronts had resolidified into a bizarre work of conceptual art.

“They’re not actually going to leave it like this, are they?” Lisa asked.

“Undecided as yet,” Chan told her. “It all depends on Ed Burdillon. I told him that a monument of this kind is worth far more to the department, and to the world, than anything that could be put in its place, but this is supposed to be a research-active department, and there is a war on.”

“It won’t matter,” Morgan Miller stated loftily. “When the big collapse really begins, in ten or twenty or thirty years, all this will be lost. Not just the appearance, but the meaning too.”

“A pity, if true,” Chan opined. “The allegory of Mouseworld was never so apt as it was in the manner and aftermath of its destruction. I always said it was a far better symbol of the world’s predicament than you would ever allow, and I was right.”

Chan was the only one of the three who could have kept his job if he had wanted to. The university authorities still didn’t know about his unauthorized usurpation of the Mouseworld experiment, and probably never would. His only misdemeanor, according to the official record, had been an idiosyncratic but understandable desire to talk to Lisa before he talked to Peter Grimmett Smith. That was little or nothing by comparison with Morgan’s self-confessed forty-year history of unlicensed and unrecorded experiments. If Morgan had bothered to state his case to the Ethics Committee and the university senate, he would have faced several dozen charges of gross misconduct and would have lost on every one of them.
Even so
, Lisa thought,
it would have been very interesting to hear his defense, and it would have been a real education for every undergraduate allowed to listen in.

She hadn’t had the option of stepping down
that
quietly, although neither Judith Kenna nor Peter Grimmett Smith had had the slightest interest in putting her in the witness box in an open court. She had been refused permission to resign before facing an internal inquiry, so she had been forced to undergo the ritual humiliation of listing as many of her sins as she cared to admit, expressing repentance and offering profuse thanks for the leniency of her punishment. She had taken the procedure very seriously, as was only to be expected of such a long-serving officer, and she had taken great care to confess to every peccadillo they could actually prove, even condescending to own up to a couple they couldn’t, in the interests of not having them dig too deeply in pursuit of more.

Surprisingly enough, she had played the game well enough to absolve Mike Grundy from all blame except that attached to his carelessness in managing his computer passwords. For that, he got off with a caution. He could have gone back to work, at least for a year or two—so his resignation, like Chan’s, really had been voluntary. As Lisa had anticipated, he had no difficulty in looking after himself, and he required no help from her or Leland or anyone else in finding a new challenge.

Judith Kenna had also walked away from the affair without the slightest blot on her reputation. Lisa never heard whether or not Peter Grimmett Smith had been tokenistically censured by the oafs who had thrown him in at the deep end without adequate support, but she hoped that he’d escaped more or less unscathed. Because Morgan Miller declined to give any testimony relevant to the charges of abduction and malicious wounding, the CPS had to drop them, and the specific individuals who had taken part in the raid on Lisa’s flat and the bombing of Mouseworld were never conclusively identified. The only person to serve a jail sentence was Helen Grundy, who had been given three months for vandalism, although she had been released on amnesty after a fortnight. Stella Filisetti had contrived, with the aid of a good lawyer, to obtain release. Lisa assumed that she would be continuing her promising career as a loose cannon, although she had been refused access to her former equipment. Arachne West had never even been arrested.

On the whole, though, Lisa couldn’t see that the ending was a particularly happy one. There was no technology of longevity, for women or for men, but there was a nasty weapon that would always be lurking in the background of life, even if it were never actually fired. And no matter how well the measures recommended by the Containment Commission worked, or how cleverly they would be facilitated by the newly resurgent textile industry, Malthus was still right. The world’s overabundant population was still increasing, and the longer that situation persisted, the steeper would be its fall when the bubble eventually burst. Everyone in the world who was blessed or cursed with a fully developed Cassandra Complex was still in the endless tunnel, still unable to glimpse the light, still laboring under the curse of helplessness.

Lisa couldn’t believe that the biowar defense mechanisms pioneered by the MOD and private enterprise would be completely effective. If she had ever been tempted to believe that, Chan’s explanation of why his own revolutionary antibody packaging had failed would have put her right. It hadn’t failed because it hadn’t worked, but because it had worked too well.

“If our immune systems could work any better than they do,” he had told her after concluding his deliberately vague technical summary, “natural selection would probably have ensured that they would. The problem posed by viruses of the common cold and of influenza viruses isn’t just a matter of mutation—it’s also a matter of mimicry. The most successful diseases hide their DNA in protein coats that reproduce protein-formations already manifest in the body’s own structures. If the immune system reacts against them too aggressively, it triggers autoimmune responses far more deleterious than the disease effects of the virus—because the most successful diseases are also discreet. Killing one’s host is a very bad survival strategy.

“Colds and flu viruses aren’t very effective mimics because their evolution is driven by natural selection—but you can bet your life that the designers of bioweapons are much better at it. Hyperflu is the equivalent of a shot across civilization’s bow. The real war won’t begin until the autoimmune provocateurs are released—and when they are, any general-purpose responsive system is likely to be turned, producing cures far worse than the diseases. Packaging the systems in clothing rather than in the cells of the body is ingenious, but if the flesh/fabric relationship is intimate enough to allow the systems to work, it’s probably too intimate to prevent them from being turned. In the end, the piecemeal solutions will probably be the ones that work best—and best is a relative term. There is no ultimate defense. Plague war is coming, and billions are going to die. Not next year, or the year after, but soon enough.”

Lisa had to suppose that it was all true, even though Chan couldn’t tell her exactly what it was that Edgar Burdillon had been working on for the MOD, let alone what the fashion industry had waiting for the new season to arrive. So why on earth, she wondered as she turned her back on the ruined room, did she feel so ludicrously cheerful? How could she be looking forward to working for a half-baked organization like the Institute of Algeny? Wasn’t that a defeat, no less ignominious by virtue of the fact that it was a fate she would have to share with Morgan Miller and Chan Kwai Keung?

“You must be sorry to be going,” she said to Morgan as they descended the staircase together. “This place has been your life.”

“No, it hasn’t,” he told her with customary perversity. “I’ve lived my life in the privacy of my own skull, and I’ll live the rest of it in exactly the same place. It doesn’t matter in the least where the props and waste-disposal units are.”