The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “Storytellers in search of more reassuring parables argued that if mice were smart enough to avoid the worst effects of overpopulation, ultrasmart humans ought to be able to do it too. They chose to ignore the fact that it wasn’t intelligence that was enabling McKendrick’s luckier mice to do what they did. They also chose to ignore the fact that humans haven’t gone through nearly enough generations since the first human population crisis to begin to develop the kind of facultative response that the luckier mice possessed.”

  “And these are lucky mice?” Lisa asked, waving her hand in a broad semicircle to encompass as much of Mouseworld as she could.

  “They are now,” Miller confirmed. “To begin with, all four populations boomed and then crashed, and then went through the whole cycle again—but after the second crash, the more adaptable mice had come into their inheritance. Since then, all four populations have stabilized. Imagine that: London, Paris, Rome, and New York, all marching in step toward a common goal! Inspiring, in its way, but no real cause for congratulations. The mice have been intensively studied, of course, to see exactly how they work the physiological tricks that allow them to stabilize their populations, in the hope that science might provide for humans what natural selection probably hasn’t—but given that we are so smart, it seems ridiculous to try to duplicate the admittedly imperfect methods of mindless mice, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Lisa said. “It depends. If intelligence produces a political solution to the problem, that would be a triumph. But if it doesn’t … mightn’t it be a good idea to have a biological solution as backup?”

  “If only it were that simple,” Miller replied sadly—but he didn’t seem in the least scornful of her suggestion. “Alas, if our intelligence is inadequate to facilitate a purely social solution, it can hardly be expected to facilitate the social application of a biological one. People who refuse to use contraception for the sake of the common good are hardly likely to accept institutionally imposed sterilization, are they?”

  “Actually,” Lisa said, grateful that the training she’d recently undergone was useful for something, “that’s not as obvious as it seems. People accept policing to the extent that they do because they admit the necessity of restraint and want it imposed uniformly and fairly. All motorists routinely break the speed limit and park their cars wherever they can, and they all get mad if they’re caught by radar or ticketed by a traffic officer, but they all accept the fundamental necessity of speed limits and parking restrictions.”

  “That’s a fair point,” Miller conceded, “and the comparison is probably more relevant than it seems, given that so many people seem to care at least as much about their cars as their children. I can see that you’ll be a considerable asset to my seminars on the neoMalthusians. Maybe you can take them over next year. But you mustn’t allow yourself to become too entranced with Mouseworld. Whatever its running costs may be, they’re trivial compared to the time it can soak up. Whatever you do, don’t volunteer to help with the counting or the data processing. As far as the production of interesting results is concerned, the cities ran into the law of diminishing returns ten years ago. No matter how long they may continue, each hour invested in their observation will produce less and less reward as time goes by. You and I, Lisa, must concentrate our attention on events on a much smaller scale. DNA is the key to everything: all biological understanding and all bio technological possibility. Can we move on now?”

  She couldn’t help noticing that it was the first time he had spoken her name. She was slightly ashamed of herself for caring, but she figured that she could probably forgive herself, if the need arose.

  In spite of Morgan Miller’s advice, Lisa couldn’t help being fascinated by Mouseworld. She was relieved to discover that she wasn’t the only one and that its captivating influence wasn’t confined to fledgling research students. Chan Kwai Keung was already in his second year of postdoctoral study, having committed himself to the long rite of passage by which aspiring university scientists had to spend the early phases of their careers working on short-term contracts for derisory salaries. His stature was a little shorter than Morgan Miller’s, and no slimmer than Lisa’s, but he moved with an economical grace that made him seem far less obtrusive than either of them. He always had a book in his hand, but Lisa suspected that the habit had as much to do with an obsessive need to have a kind of retreat permanently available as with any desire to cultivate an image as the most studious apprentice in the department’s junior ranks.

  Chan, unusually, had already tried the more lucrative option of working for one of the big pharmaceutical companies in the field of animal transgenics, but had decided that he would rather work in the pub-He sector. Most of Lisa’s fellow postgrads thought he was mad, and the fact that he loved to sit and read in a tubular-framed chair in a corner of Mouseworld greatly encouraged that opinion. When Lisa asked him why he had returned to the public sector, he murmured something about finding it difficult to breathe while wearing a gag, adding a gnomic comment to the effect that the air in Mouseworld was naturally bad, and therefore good, rather than unnaturally bad, and therefore worse. On the subject of Mouseworld itself, by contrast, his voice elevated itself to a normal conversational level and his manner became noticeably less self-effacing.

  “Morgan has a jaundiced view of the experiment,” Chan explained late one afternoon when Lisa contrived to distract him from his reading sufficiently to indulge in a long and languid conversation. “He considers that it has made its point and has no further utility, but that is because he has a very limited view of its achievements. He does not appreciate the true value of its spin-off.”

  “People do tend to be cynical about spin-off,” Lisa pointed out. “I don’t suppose it’s true that the only spin-off the U.S. space program ever generated was the nonstick frying pan and the stretch-fabric bra, but the fact that people say it’s so is revealing in its way.”

  “I did not have that kind of technological spin-off in mind,” Chan admitted, “but even in that arena, Mouseworld has made its contribution. Had its original designers only thought to patent the automatic feeding-and-cleaning system, they might now be on the threshold of a fortune. The apparatus recently built for harvesting human growth hormone from the urine of a population of transgenic mice is a straightforward modification of the architecture of Mouseworld.”

  “You’re taking the piss!” Lisa said, her suspicion tempered by pride in the quickness of her wit. “On an industrial scale?”

  “Indeed not,” Chan replied, although the faint grin playing at the corners of his mouth suggested that he was not a man who could always resist the temptation to improvise a straight-faced tall tale. “Sheep like Dolly and Polly and calves like Rosie may grab all the headlines, but milk is by no means the only bodily fluid that can be augmented with the aid of transplanted genes. The bladder has many advantages as a bioreactor, partly because urine is continually produced by male as well as female animals, but mainly because it is much less chemically complex than milk, thus making separation of the desired protein much easier.

  “Although it is not yet fashionable, I believe that the urine of mice has greater potential as a pharmaceutical carrier than most of its rivals—certainly more than the semen of pigs and probably more than the fluid secretions of rubber trees. Milk is, admittedly, in the running, but my belief is that it will prove to be too difficult and too time-consuming to produce breeding populations of transformed sheep, goats, and cattle. If milk ultimately wins out as the carrier of choice, the rabbits, whose use has been pioneered by the Dutch, will probably win out as producers; what they lack in terms of the prolific production of milk, they make up in terms of the prolific production of more rabbits. They too are kept in faculties whose architecture owes something to the inspiration of Mouseworld.”

  “Which the designers failed to patent?”

  “Alas, yes. The world was very different then. The so-called ‘Green Revolution’ was planned and carrie
d out by workers in the public sector, who published everything and ignored the niceties of intellectual property rights. The bio technological revolution, on the other hand, is being planned and carried out by employees of large corporations, which only publish ads and slogans and try very hard to claim intellectual property rights to everything—including their ads and their slogans. If you look with educated eyes, you can see it happening in Mouseworld, as the privileged inhabitants of the central H Block become increasingly anonymous and furtive, hiding secrets into which no one but each mouse’s master manipulator is supposed to know. That is more the kind of spin-off I had in mind when I first raised the issue.”

  “Professor Miller doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for the notion that the four cities are an accurate parable of the human predicament,” Lisa told him.

  “Perhaps he is insensitive to the deeper subtleties of the parable,” Chan suggested. “He tends to think of the mice in the central block as something separate from the cities, so when he speaks of Mouseworld as a parable, he only has in mind the population problem, but the population problem is not all there is to Mouseworld, any more than it is all there is to the human world. I am not saying, of course, that every other aspect of the human world is mirrored in the confusion of that magical H—but I do say that those with the eyes to see it will find more mirrors there than they might expect.”

  “The models,” Lisa said, to demonstrate that she was on the ball. “Around the walls, the more or less healthy masses, but in the ghetto, the seriously sick.”

  In the wake of the Human Genome Project, there had been a boom in the use of transgenic mice as “models” of every known human genetic-deficiency disease. All kinds of gene-based diseases that were difficult to investigate in living human patients could be inflicted on “knockout mice” by deliberately damaging the relevant gene in mouse embryos, which could then produce true-breeding populations of mice, all of whose members were victims. Where variant forms of a still-functional gene were responsible for pathological symptoms, the variant forms could be transplanted from humans into mice in place of the deleted native version, with only a little less trouble. The development of the diseases could be tracked much more closely in model mice because specimens could be killed and dissected at every relevant stage, and the populations also provided valuable preliminary testing grounds for possible treatments and cures.

  “That’s right,” said Chan, bowing his head slightly to acknowledge her alacrity. “But you must follow the analogy farther.”

  She tried. The evening sun, which was shining in a margin of clear sky but Ht abundant clouds from below, was filling the room with a peculiarly fiery light. Where it reflected from the transparent-plastic faces of the cages, it was more red than gold.

  “You mean that the models are temporary residents in Mouseworld,” she ventured eventually. “The business is booming now, but it’ll be a short-term thing. As we find the treatments and the cures, the models will become obsolete—and in the human world too, the genetic-deficiency diseases will begin to disappear.”

  “If only it were that simple,” Chan lamented. “Alas, we shall probably be required to keep the models long after their human analogues have become mercifully extinct. Already there are redundant models mingled with the others, mere library specimens sustained in case they should someday become necessary again. Naturally enough, you are thinking of the most obvious applications of the new technology—the battle against Huntington’s disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, phenylketonuria, and all the other crippling conditions our new model armies will allow us to defeat. Those models are, of course, the ones that wear their names with pride. But what of the others?”

  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?