The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “And who were they?” Smith demanded.

  “The one in charge told me his name’s Leland,” Lisa told him. “Mike Grundy will be checking out the van as we speak, but it’ll probably be a dead end. Leland’s just a fly attracted by the stink. Working for the Cabal, he says—but that might be garbage. If he’s just a chancer, he’s not important; if he is working for the emperors of private enterprise, we might as well let him play his hand. If he finds Morgan before we do, so much the better. That’s why I thought it was worth giving him some rope to play with instead of calling in as soon as I woke up. Why are we going to Swindon?”

  The helicopter was moving rapidly through the night, but Lisa had lost her sense of direction. The lights below could have been Paulton, but she wasn’t sure.

  “Why not?” Smith asked. “Have you got a better idea?”

  Lisa didn’t want to go to Swindon, and she did have a better idea—but she didn’t want to tell Peter Grimmett Smith what it was, especially while she was wearing Jeff’s bug-infested clothing.

  “We’ve missed our appointment,” she stalled. “Surely they’ll have locked up and gone home.”

  “Someone’s waiting up for us,” he assured her. “Did you and this Leland fellow get anything useful out of the two women?”

  “Only bullshit,” Lisa told him. “Leland thinks they’re some kind of secret cult freaked out by signs of the apocalypse. He thinks they may be after something Morgan contributed to the project that Ed Burdillon had put his way—the defense work you sounded me out about while we were on our way to Ahasuerus—but he’s not sure.”

  “You don’t agree,” Smith was quick to observe.

  “I don’t believe they’re apocalypse freaks. I suspect they’re exactly what they seem to be: radical feminists. Leland didn’t even know a Real Woman when he saw one, and when I told him what she was, he figured that he might be able to excite her disdain for Stella Filisetti because she’s prettier and hasn’t cultivated her muscles. I think he annoyed her by failing so utterly to understand where she was coming from.” She was speaking as much for Leland’s benefit as Smith’s, on the assumption that he was still listening in as he headed for the cityplex in the hope of picking up Chan’s trail.

  “You’d have to explain it to me too, I’m afraid,” Smith said unenthusiastically. “But not now. We’ve more important matters to deal with.”

  The niceties of post-backlash feminism obviously interested him as little as they interested Leland. Lisa had to remind herself that Smith, like her, had been born in the late twentieth century and had been delivered by maturity into the midst of the so-called backlash. Like Leland, he took it for granted that people he didn’t agree with were all essentially alike. Lisa knew better—and she suspected that the internal politics of twenty-first-century feminism might have a significant bearing not merely on the motive for Morgan Miller’s abduction, but on its ultimate outcome.

  Real Women hadn’t seen the stalling of the feminist cause as an unfortunate failure of a crusade to win equality of opportunity and reward. For them, as Arachne West had taken great pains to explain, the battle had always been a straightforward power struggle. What men had surrendered in the late twentieth century was no more than a series of palliative concessions, intended to blunt the force of female complaint and produce the illusion that progress would continue to be made if only women could be patient. The Real Women weren’t interested in inching toward equality; they wanted to take as much ground as possible as quickly as possible by any means available—and they didn’t see any virtue in stopping when the balance was even. They wanted the upper hand, although they didn’t have any illusions about the difficulty of taking it. That tied in to their unbounded enthusiasm for “natural physical culture.”

  Although the movement’s brief popularity had passed by 2035 at the latest, the remaining Real Women still saw themselves as units in an army of conquest. Other feminists might see them as misfits unable to compromise with the demands of the moment, but that only made it all the more remarkable that the Real Woman had been fighting shoulder to shoulder with Stella Filisetti—and that Stella had had the gun that fired real bullets. The conspiracy whose outlines had now been revealed was, Lisa knew, far more remarkable than Leland or Peter Grimmett Smith could imagine.

  “We need to find Chan,” Lisa told Smith. “They may go after him again.”

  “We have people on that,” Smith assured her. “So has Chief inspector Kenna. Dr. Chan’s behaving rather irresponsibly, I fear. Professor Burdillon should never have admitted him to the research program.”

  “According to Leland,” Lisa told him, “the project was and is redundant. He says that the princes of private enterprise already have a method of protecting their clients from the effects of plague war. Presumably, the only reason they haven’t advertised it already is that they’re letting paranoia inflate demand. It’s nice to know that all those Mexican, Nigerian, and Cambodian kids are dying in a good cause, isn’t it?”

  Peter Grimmett Smith was staring at her, but it wasn’t the thought of millions of Third World children dying for lack of a defense that had startled him; it was the thought that the megacorps hadn’t deigned to inform his government of the fact that they had the means to save whomever they wanted to save from the war that wasn’t officially a war at all.

  “Chan was right all along,” Lisa remarked.

  “I can’t agree,” Smith retorted. “This ludicrous insistence on talking to you before he parts with whatever information he has is holding up the investigation.”

  “Not about that,” Lisa said. “About the politics of Mouseworld. He always said that it was a better mirror of contemporary human affairs than Morgan would ever allow, and he was right. No matter how hard we pretended, Mouseworld’s cities were always ruled from without, not from within. The imperatives of birth and death, and the conditions in which life had to be lived, were all determined by the experimenters: the Secret Masters. They always had the power to decide how many mice there were, which ones lived and which ones died. The mice only had to find their own stability because the experimenters refused to intervene—which they could have done at any time, according to their merest whim or most careful long-term strategy. Sound familiar?”

  “It sounds irrelevant” Smith told her.

  “Unlike the Institute of Algeny, I suppose,” Lisa said. “I think we’d get to the heart of the problem a lot faster if I could talk to an old friend of mine—Arachne West.” She figured it was safe to say that much, even with Leland listening in. As soon as Mike Grundy saw the Real Woman at the cottage, he’d remember Arachne, and he’d start looking for her. Leland would find out about that soon enough, if he cared to. But Lisa wasn’t about to say any more, for the present. Now didn’t seem to be the right time to inform Peter Smith—or anyone else—that she had a shrewd suspicion as to who might have recruited Arachne and her loyal troopers to assist in the kidnapping of Morgan Miller, or that she had formed a plausible hypothesis as to why that person thought the discovery that Miller might or might not have made was worth killing for.

  “Arachne West will have to wait,” Smith informed her brusquely. “I have a trail of my own to follow, and I may need your advice again.”

  “Okay,” said Lisa, knowing there was nothing she could do about it. “So we go to Swindon first.”

  She couldn’t help resenting the digression, but she knew she had to make the best of it. The quicker they got through the interview with the Algenists, the sooner the helicopter would be on its way westward again. In the meantime, she had to take the opportunity to reconsider her own long-term strategy as carefully and profoundly as she could. She had to figure out exactly whose side she ought to be on, if her guesses turned out to be correct, when the cracked plot finally fell apart. That would be a lot easier, she supposed, if she could only work out what Stella Filisetti had meant when she claimed to know how Lisa had “kept her own options open.” The one enigma her guesswork hadn’t
even begun to unravel centered on how she was supposed to prove she had known all along what this uproar was all about, when she hadn’t known at all.

  If the radfems believed, however mistakenly, that Morgan Miller really had stumbled onto a technology of longevity that worked only on females, why would they think that she would have had to do anything to keep her options open?

  FIFTEEN

  The night through which the helicopter soared was clear of cloud, but the light pollution was too intense to allow the stars to be seen. The moon was three-quarters full and the pink stain cast on its face by the intervening atmosphere seemed slightly sinister, as if it were an extension of the vale of shadow that hid the invisible crescent.

  The vibration that crept into Lisa’s limbs from the polished plastic upholstery seemed to be growing more intrusive with every minute that passed. Although she had relaxed into her seat with some relief after the constant tension of the interrogations in the cottage, Lisa felt that she was already back on the edge of experience. She began to wish she had taken advantage of Leland’s invitation to raid the fridge at the cottage. Hunger was now adding to the confusion of troubles by which she was beleaguered, although not as much as exhaustion was.

  Peter Smith finally thought of asking Lisa how her hand and arm were.

  “They’re okay,” she assured him. “Leland gelled the dart wound. I’ll be able to peel the sealant off my hand tomorrow, and I should be able to use it normally. I could do with some sleep, though—some real sleep, that is. My usual insomnia seems to have deserted me in my hour of need. I don’t know why, but knockout drops don’t do the trick. I woke up just as tired as I was before I fell unconscious.”

  “I know the feeling,” Smith admitted. “We’ll fly back to the Renaissance as soon as the Algenists’ spokesman has given us his side of the story. I’m beginning to wish I’d taken a couple of hours out this morning, while you were resting.”

  Lisa resented the implication that she’d wimped out when she’d accepted Smith’s offer to take time out from the investigation, but it wasn’t worth challenging. “Why all the urgency to get to the Institute of Algeny?” she asked.

  “I’m using the helicopter because I’m reasonably confident that it isn’t bugged,” Smith said, misunderstanding the import of her question. “At least I was reasonably confident until we took you aboard.”

  “You mean that the car was bugged? You had it swept?”

  “As per routine,” he said. “We’d picked up two plants that weren’t there when we left the Renaissance—one obvious, one camouflaged. Presumably planted by the same person. If the first one was there to attract our attention so we wouldn’t look hard for the second, the second could have been there to stop us short of looking really hard for a third.”

  Lisa knew that Leland had had the time, the opportunity, and the motive to rig the car after staging his flamboyant rescue, but she also knew how dangerous it was to jump to conclusions.

  “And you think the Algenists are involved?”

  Smith sighed. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “But the background check makes them look exceedingly fishy. It seems to me that they’re the people most likely to have grabbed Morgan Miller.”

  “Why would they do that? He went to them.”

  “The fact that he went to them could have convinced them that he had something valuable. If he then decided to take it to Ahasuerus instead of handing it to them—and it seems to me that if he did any kind of proper background check, that’s what he’d have decided to do—they might well have figured it was time to take matters into their own hands.”

  It didn’t sound at all likely to Lisa, but that was the emerging pattern of the investigation. Everyone who looked into the matter seemed to be seizing on different details—details that reflected the particular tenor of their own innate paranoia. Am I any different? she wondered. Am I seeing it the way I do because that’s what tickles my idiosyncratic fancy? Are we all so terrified by the impending crisis that we’re grasping at straws, all equally blinded by fear?

  “What makes you think the Institute’s not what it seems?” was all she dared say.

  “Once we deepened our own background check, I could see why Dr. Goldfarb was so offended by the fact that Morgan Miller put Ahasuerus and the Algenists on the same list. Adam Zimmerman’s grandparents emigrated to the States in the 1930s, fleeing Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. The Foundation’s mission statement contains some very strong injunctions against releasing results that might be useful for military purposes or for political oppression. The Algenists’ website makes similar protestations, but if you look back in time far enough, it becomes fairly obvious that algeny’s intellectual forebears were firmly in the Nazi camp. The parent Institute of Algeny in Leipzig was previously a branch of the German Vril Society, which claimed descent—falsely, one presumes, but no less significantly—from the Bavarian Illuminati. There are similarly remote historical links to Theosophy, the racial theories of Count Gobineau, and something called the World Ice Theory. Does any of that ring a bell with you?”

  “No,” Lisa confessed.

  “Nor to anyone else alive and sane, I suspect. Apparently, there’s more than a linguistic analogy connecting algeny to alchemy. Vril was an occult force invented by some nineteenth-century British novelist; it was enthusiastically taken up by a number of continental occultists. Nowadays, although its current mission statements still refer in approving terms to Nietzschean moral reconstruction, contemporary algeny has cleaned up its intellectual act considerably, but if Miller bothered to do any digging, his investigations would have revealed the rotten core beneath the shiny surface.”

  Lisa had no idea of what to make of all this. It sounded almost surreal, and completely irrelevant—but she reminded herself that her own far more modest inferences had sounded equally irrelevant to Smith. “If they really are crackpots from way back when,” she said warily, “where does their money come from?”

  “Switzerland,” was the terse reply.

  Switzerland had long been a world leader in the arcane art of money laundering—which grew more arcane with every year that passed. Ordinarily, “money from Switzerland” was a euphemism for the “Mafia,” which had controlled up to fifty percent of GDP in the post-Communist nations at the turn of the century. During the last thirty years, following the example set by the organizations on which they were modeled, much of that wealth had been rechanneled into legitimate businesses, and the organizations had revamped their image considerably. Some had remarketed themselves as a new breed of revolutionary communists—hence the term “Leninist Mafia”—who were deeply and sincerely concerned with issues of social and economic reorganization. Despite their much-publicized opposition to “Imperialist Global Parasitism,” the Leninist Mafia did not seem to have fared any worse during the worldwide economic upheavals of ’25 than its alleged counterparts in China.

  “So now you think they’re gangsters pretending to be crackpots,” Lisa said skeptically. “And you think they kidnapped Morgan because they got the same impression as Goldfarb—that he was deliberately underselling whatever it was he had.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Smith said defensively. “There’s also the apocalyptic angle to consider. You said this Leland character inferred from what the women told you that they were apocalyptic cultists. Did he have any particular group in mind?”

  “No,” Lisa said. “Do you?”

  “The women didn’t mention the Ice Age Elite by any chance?”

  “That’s just post-Millennial folklore,” Lisa said. “The Real Woman started sounding off about the Secret Masters and the seeds of a New Order, but those were the only phrases she used.”

  Lisa remembered talk of the Ice Age Elite being bandied about during her years as a research student, but she couldn’t remember Morgan Miller ever having dignified their existence with an opinion. When the years 1999 and 2000 had come and gone, everyone gifted with common sense had expected Millenarian c
ults to wither away, or at least to be effectively mothballed until 2029 or 2033, the two dates most widely touted as the two-thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion. Ever perverse, however, several of the most vocal cults had refused to go away, and their tales of impending woe had grown ever more fanciful. One such tale had fixated on the anxieties expressed by some scientists that global warming might subvert the ocean-circulation mechanism sustaining the gulf stream, abruptly precipitating a new Ice Age.

  The contemporary myth of the Secret Masters hadn’t really come into its own until the crash of ’25, but earlier versions had been around long before that, and one of its earliest twenty-first-century manifestations had been the idea that the greenhouse effect was being deliberately stimulated, with the intention of causing an Ice Age. The Ice Age Elite were the plotters allegedly responsible for this scheme. They were said to have made elaborate plans to survive the ecocatastrophe in comfort. Accounts of their motives were widely various, ranging from the suggestion that they were Gaean altruists determined to save Mother Earth from further rape, to the proposition that they intended to buy up all the ruined real estate in the northern hemisphere, whose overlords they would become when they eventually unleashed the biotech that would end the Ice Age as abruptly as it had begun. Little had been heard of the Ice Age Elite since 2025, presumably because the Cabal was now widely believed to be in the process of achieving their alleged aims without having had to go to the trouble of precipitating an Ice Age.

  “The problem with folklore,” Smith told her, “is that it wouldn’t qualify as folklore if there weren’t people who believe it. Admittedly, Ahasuerus isn’t called Ahasuerus because its founder believed in the myth of the Wandering Jew in any simple sense—in fact, if the rumors of his present whereabouts can be trusted, he’d be more accurately considered to be the ultimate Sedentary Jew—but the Institute of Algeny is different. It wasn’t set up from scratch, so it still carries a certain amount of ideological baggage left over from who knows when. Its interest in future human evolution is closely linked to ideas of apocalyptic notions of destruction and transformation. You say that this Real Woman used the words ‘New Order’?”