The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “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

  Lisa’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 we
ek, 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?”

  “Not a permanent one. He just activated his answerphone during those particular calls. As if he wanted to make sure there was a record. As if he knew he might need one—even though he only asked for appointments to visit. He got the appointments within minutes, but that’s not surprising. He’s a biologist of some standing, even if he hasn’t published much recently.”

  “Who did he call?” Lisa wanted to know.

  “The first call was to the local offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation.”

  Lisa had heard of the Ahasuerus Foundation. It had been set up by some buccaneering sleazeball who’d made a fortune playing the stock market during the Great Panic of ’25, ostensibly to sponsor research into technologies of longevity and suspended animation. At least a dozen similar outfits had been set up during the last half-century by aging millionaires offended by the thought they couldn’t take their ill-gotten gains with them.

  “And the other?”

  “That’s a little weirder—some crackpot outfit in Swindon called the Institute of Algeny. Algeny apparently—”

  “I know what the word means,” Lisa told him.

  Smith raised his eyebrows slightly. “Perhaps you could explain it to me,” he said mildly. “The on-line dictionary wasn’t very clear.”

  “It was a coinage of the 1990s that never really caught on, although Morgan approved of it. It was derived by analogy with alchemy. Alchemy was a pseudoscience of inorganic transformations that assumed all metals were evolving gradually into gold, and might be given a helping hand to fulfill their aspirations if only the art could be properly understood and mastered. Algeny is an organic equivalent that assumes all organisms are striving to better themselves, and that we’re already in the process of mastering the art that will allow men to become supermen.”

  Smith nodded. Lisa’s explanation had obviously added a measure of enlightenment to what he’d learned from the dictionary. “So the most obvious thing that the two institutions Miller contacted have in common—” he began tentatively.

  “—is a strong interest in technologies of longevity,” Lisa finished for him.

  “Miller’s not a young man,” Smith observed. “Do you think he was a potential buyer?”

  Lisa considered the possibility, then shook her head. She felt that a shadow had fallen over her, and knew it must show on her face. “He was deeply ambivalent about the process of growing old,” she admitted, “but he was a lifelong enemy of narcissism. He thought that declining sperm counts and the changing demographics of the developed countries were both good things, even if they were too little too late, because it’s better to have more older and, hopefully, wiser people around than lots of hungry children. It would have gone against his conscience to seek self-preservation in a world whose population was way past the long-term carrying capacity of the ecosphere.”

  “A seller, then,” Smith said.

  Lisa shook her head to that too. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t think so.”

  Smith didn’t bother to point put that there didn’t seem to be an obvious third alternative—unless the Ahasuerus Foundation and the Institute of Algeny had something less obvious in common. “Neither institution is British,” he commented, watching closely for Lisa’s reaction. “The Swindon outfit’s European Union, but its headquarters are in Germany. Ahasuerus is American.”

  “Intellectual activity is as global as commerce nowadays,” Lisa pointed out. “In any case, the EU and the USA are the best of buddies, united against the menaces of hyperflu, international terrorism, and illicit economic migration.”

  “True,” said Smith in a tone that suggested it wasn’t the whole truth. The MOD probably figured that the nation’s friends needed more careful watching than its enemies did.

  Lisa waited for the MOD man to continue—which he did after a contemplative pause. “So tell me, Dr. Friemann,” he said, “what would a man like Dr. Miller do with a new technology of longevity if he happened to stumble across one while playing games with genetically modified mice?”

  Lisa didn’t open her mouth to begin a reply, because she knew full well that she wouldn’t be able to finish the first sentence before doubts consumed it and spat it out. She needed more time to weigh the possibilities and to recalculate her assessments of the situation as she had so far found it. She shuffled uncomfortably in her seat, not because the chair was badly designed, but because the ambience of the seminar room had begun to call forth fugitive memories of long-past pressures and intellectual discomforts.

  As long ago as 1999, she knew, a gene had been discovered whose modification extended the normal life span of a mouse by a third. It had triggered an assiduous search for more, which had still been in full swing in 2002, but Morgan had never deigned to participate. He had correctly predicted that the equivalent gene in humans would turn out to have been activated already by the processes of natural selection that had extended the human life span in the interests of parental care. Was it conceivable, she wondered, that even though he hadn’t been in the hunt, Morgan had nevertheless contrived to stumble upon a transformation that allowed mice to live much longer than their natural spans without exposing them to the long-understood rigors of calorific restriction? If so, it might have provided a motive powerful enough to inspire his kidnappers—and maybe a motive powerful enough to take the precaution of destroying every single mouse in Mouseworld.

  Lisa wondered if Morgan’s paranoia about overpopulation might have been sufficiently intense to stop him from publishing an experimental finding that might have made the problem even worse—but she quickly rejected the hypothesis. As she had already told Peter Grimmett Smith, Morgan wasn’t that kind of man. Nor was he the kind of man who would automatically seek custodians for any kind of secret inside such fringe organizations as the Ahasuerus Foundation and the Institute of Algeny—in which case, why on earth had he contacted them? The fact that he had might have persuaded someone—someone who didn’t know him as well as she did—that he might have a secret worth stealing. In these troubled times, even a hint might have been enough to move someone to take desperate measures to steal his secret.

  “Do you think someone inside one of the two organizations had Morgan snatched?” Lisa asked.

  “It’s an appealing hypothesis,” Smith conceded. “If not, perhaps someone in one of them forwarded the information to some interested third party.”

  “An unfriendly foreign government?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Or the Cabal?”

  Smith frowned. “We don’t use journalistic terms like that, Dr. Friemann. We’re rather old-fashioned in the Ministry. We still use phrases like ‘private enterprise’ without the slightest hint of sarcasm. But, yes—I suppose it’s possible that whatever Dr. Miller told the people at the Foundation and at the Institute was clandestinely passed on, perhaps in garbled form, to someone who scented a quick profit rather than to someone more interested in biowarfare. If either is the case, we need to know exactly what he did tell them.”

  And you need to be able to understand the answers, Lisa thought. Which is where I come in—and why you’re willing to overlook Judith Kenna’s reservations about me. Chan’s the only other person with my advantages, and he’s not turned up yet. He’s also not British.

  “Have you heard the tape of my conversation with the burglar?” Lisa asked the MOD man.

  Smith shook his head. “DI Grundy let me in on the summary he’d received from an officer at the scene, but that’s all,” he said.

  “I thought it was just bullshit at first,” Lisa said slowly, “but it’s becoming clearer. The intruder said that Morgan Miller didn’t give a damn about me—that whatever he’d promised me, I’d end up with nothing. Either they
were assuming that Morgan had already confided in me as to what he was taking to Ahasuerus and the Institute of Algeny, or they were fishing—trying to figure out by provocation whether I knew. Hell and damnation! I never thought to check whether they’d taken the wafer out of the answerphone. Of course they did. That may even have been what they were after, although they had to take the rest in case I’d changed it or backed it up … they must have figured they had to cover the possibility even though they weren’t sure that Morgan had called me.”

  “Which he hadn’t, had he?” Smith prompted, presumably to secure his own peace of mind. “He hadn’t actually told you anything at all.”

  “Nothing at all,” Lisa confirmed grimly, wondering why not. Surely, if Morgan had made any kind of groundbreaking discovery, he’d have been avid to share his triumph, desperate to bounce the idea off someone who understood not merely the nature of his work, but the philosophy behind it.

  Or would he?

  Suddenly the whole hypothesis reverted to the semblance of a house of cards, too frail to survive the least disturbance. As she’d tried to impress on Mike Grundy, nobody stumbled across longevity technologies, or anything of comparable value, by accident. Morgan Miller’s Holy Grail had always been another kind of vessel entirely. He’d always been far more interested in methods of transformation than in the manipulation of particular genes. There were likely thousands of geneticists worldwide who had been looking into the genetic bases of aging for half a century—how could one man working on something entirely different stumble across something they couldn’t find with a directed search?

  “There must be other areas of concern that the two institutions have in common,” Lisa said speculatively. “We shouldn’t get hung up on the seemingly obvious until we’ve actually talked to them.”

  “You need some sleep,” Smith said. “My people still have work to do here, not just in Miller’s office and lab, but in Burdillon’s too—we’re not about to jump to any conclusions without covering all the ground. We also have to complete our background checks on the institutions before we move in on them. Chief Inspector Kenna says that you can’t go home yet, and there’s no point in challenging her ruling, so I want you to check into one of the hotels close to the campus and get your head down. I’ll be in one called the Renaissance, I think. Take a pill if you have to. I’ll pick you up when I’m ready.”