The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “You and I never view one another, or anyone else, with any other kind of eye,” she answered dryly. “And no, I wouldn’t call either one of us a failure, or judge our skills as obsolete. We do good work, and we do it well. We may not be close to defeating the forces of chaos as yet, but we’re certainly doing our bit to hold them back.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Chan told her bleakly. “It’s the mask you must maintain at work, and it may well suit you to leave it in place even when you leave, but you know in your heart of hearts that the world is going from bad to worse and that our contribution to its decay is a mere matter of ritual. I used to believe that I could make a difference, not by virtue of any unique ability of my own, but as part of the great bio technological crusade. I recognize now that the best that crusade can hope for is to assist in the rebuilding of civilization after the collapse.”

  “I don’t believe you believe that,” Lisa retorted. “You’ve spent too much of your life in one place, working alongside the likes of Morgan Miller. If you’re going to wallow in the same pathological Cassandra Complex, you’d better school yourself to take the same perverse delight in prophecies of doom as he does. You can’t convince me that you’re as crazy or malevolent as the people I labor to put away. You’re one of the sanest men I know, and one of most morally upstanding. You’re not one of them, and never will be. Modesty is one thing, but drastic underestimation is another. And the fact remains—if the world is to be saved, biotechnology is the means that will save it. The crusade has to go on. Even Morgan says so.”

  After conversations of that nature, it was always good to return to the company of innocents like Mike Grundy, whose underlying faith in the cause had never been dented, even though the wellspring of his old cheerfulness had gradually dried up.

  “We’re victims of our own success,” he said on the day the Eurostar plague leaders were found guilty and sentenced to life. “The prisons are overflowing because we’ve become so bloody good at catching the evildoers. The advancement of your kind of forensics and the rapid spread of invisible eyes and ears has made it extremely difficult to plan any kind of successful premeditated crime and almost impossible to get way with any unpremeditated act of violence. At the moment, the situation seems absurd, because people haven’t yet managed to adjust their behavior to take account of the certainty of getting caught, but that’s temporary. As soon as everybody gets it into his head that he can’t get away with it anymore, the incidence of criminal behavior is bound to fall—and once the trend starts, it’ll go all the way. If we can just hang in there, we can usher in a whole new moral order.”

  Lisa had no difficulty in playing devil’s advocate to pessimism and optimism alike. “We’re victims of our own success, all right,” she said. “With the aid of mouse models, oral vaccines, and gene therapy, we’ve wiped out all the premature killers except the ones cooked up in labs to steer around the defenses. We’ve never been healthier, never so long-lived, never so crowded, never so old. But gray power isn’t really wisdom, is it? It’s inertia. The rights of the aged mostly translate into the right to be stuck in one’s ways, to rail against anything and everything new, to see everything as a threat. I could get nostalgic for the days when most of the people we put away were young, because it was at least possible to hope that they might change—but your new moral order will have to be built from the bottom up, and the demographic structure of today’s world is way too top-heavy.”

  “It isn’t the old who are committing the crimes,” Mike said. “The average age of offenders may be rising steadily, but that’s because it started out so low.”

  “No, it isn’t the old who are committing the crimes,” Lisa agreed, “but it’s the old, by and large, who are provoking them—and, increasingly, striking back. When they begin to figure that it might be a good idea to get their retaliation in first, the shit really will hit the fan, and all the invisible eyes and ears in the world won’t inhibit them. The Eurostar plague merchants weren’t just amateurs, they were idiots. When somebody decides to do the job properly, we’ll certainly see the beginning of a new moral order—but not the kind you have in mind.”

  “You still spend too much time with Miller and the other old witches cackling around their cauldrons at the university,” Mike told her, unaware that he was ironically echoing what Lisa had said to Chan. “You should have cut that umbilical cord long ago. We’re in the real world, and we have to tackle practical problems in a practical way. So do the people we’re trying to control—and in the end, they’ll accept that. They have to.”

  “Unfortunately,” Lisa said, “they don’t. That’s why we keep picking up the pieces—and why every year that passes delivers more and more pieces to our doorstep.”

  “We still have to keep picking them up,” Mike insisted. “What other choice do we have?”

  “None,” she admitted. “But having no choice is no guarantee that we’ll win in the end.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like Helen,” Mike told her glumly. “Or she’s beginning to sound like you. She used to be so optimistic, so brave, but now … it’s far worse being a social worker, of course, than being in the force. When we send them up, we chalk up another victory, and every year brings more, but that’s just another beginning as far as Helen’s people are concerned. What’s winning, from her perspective? All she can ever do is to try to hold back time, and in the end, she always loses.”

  “She could move on,” Lisa pointed out.

  “So could we,” Mike countered. “Even if we’ve both hit our limit promotionally, we could move sideways—but we don’t. We keep plugging on, willing prisoners of routine. Helen’s the same. She’s losing her courage as well as her convictions, but she’s no quitter. Not at work.”

  “Citizen mice,” Lisa said quietly.

  “What?”

  “That’s how the mice adapt—the ones that do. They accept the conditions of adversity. They accept the narrowing of their personal space. They accept the loss of their reproductive drive. They accept that the only thing to do is to stave off disaster and keep staving it off. They accept that there’s no virtue in being a competitive rat when competition only leads to ulceration and cannibalism and insanity.”

  “We’re not mice, Lis. We’re people.”

  “I know that,” Lisa told him, “but we have the same problems as mice, and some of us find the same solutions, while we look for all the others that we need and can’t quite find.”

  “The bloody Cassandra Complex,” Mike observed in disgust. “Sometimes, you know, I could almost wish that you’d joined the Real Women when you had the chance. Arachne West and her chums might have been crazy as well as ugly, but she wasn’t as miserable as Morgan Miller and the comic-book Chinaman. Helen’s still in touch, I think, if you want to change your mind.”

  “Citizen mice don’t change their minds,” Lisa told him. “They just keep on going with the flow.”

  “Until it ends.”

  “Until it ends,” she agreed.

  PART THREE

  The Morality of Algeny

  THIRTEEN

  The second captive was wide awake and wary by now. Jeff had taken no chances with the smartfiber bonds that secured her right hand and her left foot to the steel frame of the bed, but it was a collapsible bed and she could probably have broken it into pieces if she’d cared to exert herself. She hadn’t. She was still sipping meekly from a mug of tea when Lisa and Leland came in, but she set the mug down on the low formica-topped table that Jeff had placed conveniently close at hand. The way in which she looked up at her captors suggested that she had a better appreciation of the hopelessness of her situation than Stella Filisetti did, but her features were stubbornly firm.

  “Okay,” Leland said without preamble, “this is the situation. My name’s Leland. I think you know Dr. Friemann, even though you’ve never been formally introduced. Not unnaturally, she’s eager to bring in her police colleagues and the MOD so you can be properly char
ged, tried, convicted, and put up for the next ten years or so, but she’s also anxious about the safety of Morgan Miller. I’ve managed to persuade her that we might get to him sooner if we make a deal with you, and she’s agreed to delay calling in her colleagues until we’ve explored that possibility. Time is pressing, and your window of opportunity won’t stay open for long. We’ve already had a chat with Ms. Filisetti, and to be perfectly honest, I can’t imagine how any sane and reasonable person—I’m prepared to assume for the moment that you can be included in that category—could possibly get involved in any scheme based on information obtained by a person like that. You must suspect by now that you’ve been led up the garden path right into the compost heap and that your only chance of getting out of this with your life intact is to dump the imbeciles who got you into it. So how about it?”

  Lisa watched the Real Woman’s reaction carefully. The offer had to sound good, but only if the woman thought Leland could be trusted. For her own part, Lisa thought Leland could be trusted about as far as you could throw a feather into a headwind, but she still hadn’t called for help. Anything he got, she wanted to have too.

  “I can’t do that,” the woman said flatly.

  “Yes, you can,” Leland said mildly. “Hasn’t this thing gone far enough out of hand? It’s only a matter of time before one of your gun-toting friends shoots somebody dead. Amateurs, eh? I bet you were with the snatch squad that collected Miller—the only part of the operation that went smoothly. Did he get a chance to warn you that you were wasting your time before you put a dart in him?”

  “Since you’re so concerned,” the woman replied, “I suppose I ought to take the opportunity to warn you that you’re wasting your time.”

  “That operation in the garage was a real farce, wasn’t it?” Leland said sympathetically. “You probably figured that in advance—but you did it anyway. Under orders, I suppose. I know how that works, believe me. You take a job that looks simple enough, but then the others start to screw up and you wonder whether you should ever have got involved. Then they start improvising, and you know you should get out, but you’re already in and things are moving forward … it’s all fouled up, hasn’t it?”

  “Has it?” The Real Woman’s tone was guarded, but Lisa had the impression that she would really have appreciated an honest answer to that question, even if she couldn’t afford to believe it.

  “Your friends didn’t even take the time to do a thorough search of Lisa’s files before they started panicking, did they?” Leland went on. “They could have snatched her last night, but they didn’t. The plan’s all fucked up, isn’t it? What you did today was worse than improvisation—it was pure desperation. A gut reaction conditioned by fear. The fear was justified, by the way—the whole thing’s fallen apart. Someone like you can’t afford to stay with people like that, no matter what kind of prize is at stake—if there is a prize. Apart from Miss Filisetti, nobody really believes that there is. Dr. Goldfarb doesn’t. The people who matter at the Ministry of Defence don’t. Lisa doesn’t—and Lisa’s in a far better position to judge than Stella Filisetti, who’s only been screwing Miller for a matter of months. Given Miller’s age, he probably figured he had to work extra hard to get her interested and spun her a line about dark secrets. Maybe he was too modest. After all, it’s not as if Filisetti’s a real radfem—or even a Real Woman—is it?”

  The woman’s eyes weren’t looking into Leland’s anymore. When she had first turned away—when Leland referred to “a gut reaction conditioned by fear”—she had fixed her gaze on the wall, but now she was looking directly at Lisa, and not because the frayed anaglypta was simply too horrible to contemplate for long. Her manner was doubtful, as if she were trying to decide whether the stories she’d been told about Lisa could possibly be true. Leland obviously took due note of her uncertainty.

  “Lisa’s no traitor,” he said, his deep voice sounding surprisingly soft. “Grimmy Smith didn’t entertain the slander for a moment—he had her seconded to the MOD inquiry. He didn’t know, of course, which cause she was being accused of being a traitor to, but he knew it wasn’t true. Even Lisa didn’t know, when your colleague took time out to spray the word on her wall, what kind of betrayal she was being accused of—but now that we do know, we all can see that it’s absurd. She’s done far more for the feminist cause than Stella Filisetti ever did. She’s a police scientist, and she’s never been tempted to join half-baked rival organizations like yours, but that doesn’t mean she’s not sympathetic to-the same ideals. Think about it. If your support hadn’t been preempted and you met them both without any preconceptions, who would you be more likely to trust—Friemann or Filisetti?”

  Lisa felt a sinking sensation as she realized that it wasn’t going to work. It might have worked, given that the Real Woman had probably heard Arachne West’s account of Lisa as well as Stella Filisetti’s, but that wasn’t the only consideration. The Real Woman had deduced that Lisa hadn’t bothered to correct Leland’s misapprehension about the reason for the Real Woman’s presence in the garage. She had taken that as evidence that Lisa was playing her own game, and that she was untrustworthy from every point of view.

  “You didn’t get it, did you?” the Real Woman said to Lisa. “He didn’t give it to you.”

  “What didn’t we get?” Leland asked. “Who didn’t give it to us?”

  “Chan,” the captive said. “He’s still got the backup.”

  Lisa steeled herself against an anticipated stare, but Leland was too good an interrogator to be thrown.

  “We don’t need it,” Leland said. “The important thing is that you don’t have it and can’t get it—and that’s why the sensible thing for you to do is to give up everything you do have. If it’s enough, you can walk away. Filisetti’s the only one who’s tried to kill anyone—and that was personal. Give us Miller and you’re clear. I guarantee it.”

  The woman was obviously hesitating, carefully weighing up everything Leland had said—but not, Lisa realized, because she was contemplating acceptance of Leland’s offer. She was trying to work out the state of play, and she had no intention of turning rat.

  But why not? Lisa thought. Everything Leland had said sounded perfectly reasonable, even though he hadn’t managed to infer from the Real Woman’s sarcastic observation that Chan had been in the parking lot or that he’d been the actual target of the ambush. Lisa could understand why Stella Filisetti might not have been impressed by any offer to let her off the hook, but this woman wasn’t personally involved in the way Stella was. No matter how far out her political views might be, or how intense her paranoia, she must see that she had been dragged into deep water without adequate cause.

  In the end, the Real Woman merely shook her head. “You’re both working for the Secret Masters,” she said. “You just want to keep it for yourselves. You know the collapse is coming—hell, it’s already begun. To you, it’s just the inevitable unraveling of the tragedy of the commons. Not to us. You intend to be the seed of a New Order—well, so do we, and we have a very different idea of what that New Order ought to be. If people like me don’t do anything, the crisis won’t simply kill us all—it’ll put people like you in power for ever and ever. Your threats don’t mean a damn thing while the whole damn world is trembling on the brink. You can lock me up and throw away the key. I won’t be any worse off than the billions who’ll be scythed down by hyperflu and its successors, or starved to death in the aftermath of the pandemic. At least I’ll have gone down fighting for something I believe in. It’s not a choice between trusting Filisetti and Friemann—it’s a choice between trusting the people who stand shoulder to shoulder with Filisetti and the people whose company Friemann keeps. People like you, Mr. Leland, and the Ministry hack, and Morgan Miller, the Neanderthal neoMalthusian. We’re fighting for the future here, and we’re not going to give it up until we’re all dead, even if what Miller told us turns out to be true. I’m giving you nothing—not even name, rank, and serial number.”


  Leland was astonished, and Lisa couldn’t blame him. Everything Leland knew suggested that his ploy should have worked. On the other hand, everything she knew suggested that the crazy sequence of crimes should never have happened at all. Even if Stella had convinced others that Morgan had what she presumably thought he had, they must have suspected all along that it was a mere mirage, and the failure of the operation should have convinced them all. The Real Woman must be nursing an exceptionally powerful hatred of Leland’s employers if she wasn’t prepared to play ball “even if what Miller told us turns out to be true.”

  What Morgan must have told his kidnappers, of course, was that Stella had got it absurdly wrong—and he must surely have been able to explain to them exactly how and why she had got it wrong. But what, in that case, had Chan been so anxious to deliver to her? Stella Filisetti had obviously jumped to the conclusion it was the backup that hadn’t been found among Lisa’s possessions—but she’d never have been commissioned to collect it herself if her companions had been fully convinced. Stella must have been the prime mover in the conspiracy, but she obviously wasn’t giving the orders. So who was? Arachne West? Lisa couldn’t believe that. Arachne was too careful, too methodical.

  While she was thinking, Leland had stood up and moved to the door, but he waited there for her to follow. Lisa signaled her consent with a slight nod and he led the way down to the kitchen. Jeff wasn’t there, and Lisa couldn’t hear any sounds of movement from within the cottage.

  “Well,” Leland said as he opened the refrigerator and peered unenthusiastically into the lighted interior. “I guess that’s one own goal apiece. At least we know what we’re dealing with now.”