The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “Yes,” Lisa admitted, “but it’s a perfectly commonplace phrase.”

  “Maybe it is,” Smith agreed, “but the Real Women were great enthusiasts for physical culture, weren’t they? Very militant too, I believe.”

  “They weren’t Nazis,” Lisa said firmly. “I think you might be letting your imagination run away with you.”

  Smith obviously resented that comment, perhaps because it had a little too much accuracy in it for comfort. “Why did Leland take you along with the two women?” he asked sharply. “Even if it hadn’t been obvious that you weren’t one of them, he had only to glance at your ID. Why didn’t he leave you behind with Ginny and me, to sleep it off in the parking lot?”

  “I think he wanted to explain himself,” Lisa told him judiciously. “He wanted a quick word with the ambushers before turning them in, but he didn’t want us to think they might have been spirited away by their friends. He doesn’t want us chasing after him with the same fervor we’re devoting to the task of trying to find Morgan Miller. He’d rather we thought of him as an ally. He took me with him so I could bear witness to his good intentions. He might, of course, have fed me a complete pack of lies.”

  “But you think he was on the level—or as near to it as a man of his type ever is?”

  “Probably,” Lisa admitted, thinking that Smith was a pompous fool whose attitudes, instincts, and modes of expression were so twentieth-century as to be almost beyond belief. “While we’re still searching for Morgan, we can use all the help we can get, and whoever he’s working for, Leland does seem to be running a parallel investigation. If I’m right and this whole thing is some kind of silly mistake, it probably won’t matter who he reports to.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  Lisa looked away, feebly pretending that the view from the window had attracted her attention. The helicopter had already begun its descent and the lights of Swindon were displayed beneath her, their brightness and variety testifying that the town was booming, as it had been for half a century. It had owed its first spurt of growth to the fact that it was the halfway point between the original termini of the Great Western Railway, and it advertised itself nowadays as the bridge between the two great cityplexes of England—a claim that excited a certain amount of resentment and scorn in the Birmingham metropolitan area and United Manchester. At the moment, it looked more like an island than a bridge; the threads of illumination connecting it to Chippenham and Reading seemed as frail as spidersilk in comparison to the blaze emitted by the glittering hub where the leisure spots of the town’s twenty-four-hour society were clustered. Lisa blinked her eyes, fighting tiredness.

  “If I’m wrong,” she said, as much to herself as to Peter Smith, “and Morgan really has stumbled onto the kind of technology that can create some kind of a New Order—without bothering to tell me about it—the government doesn’t stand much chance of keeping it secret from anyone Leland might be working for, although the reverse might be a different matter. I still think the Ice Age Elite is a silly myth, but if there really are people in the world who are anxious to set themselves up as inheritors of post-Crisis Earth, our job is to make sure they don’t get away with it, whoever they are. Isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is,” Smith answered—as he would surely have done even if he hadn’t been under the assumption that Leland had planted camouflaged bugs in Lisa’s clothing. He was, after all, a loyal servant of king and country. If he couldn’t be trusted to put matters of duty above personal considerations, who could?

  SIXTEEN

  There was a uniformed policeman waiting for them at the helipad. As soon as Smith descended from the craft, the man handed him a plastic bag, which he immediately passed on to Lisa.

  “Change in the helicopter,” he commanded. “Put your belt and wristwatch in with the old clothes.” Lisa hesitated, wondering whether to raise an objection, but Smith was right. If Leland had planted anything, it was as likely to be in her belt or watch as in Jeff ’s shirt and trousers. If she had to be phoneless for a while, she had to be phoneless. She moved back to the second rank of seats so that she’d be shielded by the first, although she felt slightly shamed by her obsolete modesty.

  It wasn’t the first time she had ever put on one of the new garments, but she had found the previous tentative trial so uncomfortable that she had decided to stick with her “dead clothes” for a while longer. Now she wondered why she had reacted so negatively. Was she as much of a dinosaur as Peter Grimmett Smith? Of course not. She was a scientist, supposedly immune to the reflexive “yuck factor” that governed initial reactions to so many new biotechnologies. In a sense, her own response had had an opposite cause; she had always thought of the new fabrics in terms of “fashion,” because that was the lexicon the advertisers had used in order to push it, and she had always resisted the idea of being a slave to fashion, valuing newness for its own sake. Now, if the suspicions raised by Smith’s clumsy inquiries could be trusted, the advertising lexicon was about to undergo an abrupt change.

  What Arachne West had told Lisa on the occasion of their first meeting didn’t seem quite as paranoid now as it had then. Now it was perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain that the new global culture was a plague culture, and that smart clothing would soon have to be seen in terms of personal defense—not antibody packaging in the traditional sense, but in a significant new sense. Soon enough the first questions anyone would ask salespeople about the clothes on their racks would concern the quality of their built-in immune systems and the rapidity with which they could react to any dangerous invasion of the commensal bodies within their loving embrace.

  The garment Lisa was struggling into wasn’t uncomfortable in the sense that ill-fitting clothes could be—although the way it hugged her flesh so cloyingly was slightly disconcerting—but it was worn without underwear and followed the contours of her body so carefully that she felt unusually exposed. She hesitated before dropping her belt into the plastic bag along with the clothes she had discarded, eventually retrieving her personal smartcards and tucking them into one of the pockets of her new suit. The smartcards ought to be clean, she reasoned, and it was one thing to be phoneless, another to be keyless and creditless.

  Ginny reentered the copter just as Lisa finally let the belt drop in the bag. There was a conspiratorial gleam in the younger woman’s eye. She extended a gloved hand over the back of the front passenger seat, opening the palm to display two small white tablets. Lisa met her gaze suspiciously.

  “It’s going to be a long night, Dr. Friemann,” Ginny said. “You need to stay alert.” Her free hand also came into view, clutching a plastic bottle filled with turbid fluid. “Fortified GM fruit juice,” she explained. “Calories, vitamins, ions … everything you could possibly need. The boss told me to give it to you.” Plainly, the boss hadn’t mentioned the side order of pep pills.

  If only, Lisa thought as the comment about everything she could possibly need echoed in her skull—but she accepted the pills into her right hand and took the bottle in her left. She swallowed the pills and washed them down thoroughly.

  “Keep it,” Ginny said. “Drink the rest on the way.”

  Lisa nodded and followed the pilot out of the helicopter. She handed the plastic bag to the policeman who’d met them. “Better have them swept,” she said. “Tell the lab to be careful not to damage the goods—if the equipment is state of the art, it’ll probably come in handy. Send the proceeds back to the East Central Police Station.”

  The officer nodded.

  “The next generation of suitskins will probably have sweepers built in,” Ginny observed as she slammed the helicopter door. “The police will have to adopt smartfiber uniforms then.”

  Lisa hadn’t heard the term “suitskin” before. She’d only heard smartfiber ensembles called “smartsuits.” She had to admit, though, that the one-piece she was now wearing did feel rather like a second skin. As the fibers of such garments accumulated more faculties, their quasisymbio
tic relationship with the body’s own outer layer would become increasingly intimate as well as increasingly complex. The suits currently used to hook up to virtual-reality apparatus were much bulkier, restricted in their use to dedicated spaces, but the gap between organic and inorganic microtechnology was closing all the time.

  Sometime within the next fifty years, it would be possible to talk of nanotechnology as having arrived rather than merely anticipated, and the bridges between the organic and the inorganic would be multitudinous. Even the best suitskins imaginable would be external technology, though: overcoats for ordinary people. Even gut-based nanotech would be external in a technical rather than in a topological sense. One day, if Algenists and other champions of evolution toward the superhuman got their way, none of it would be necessary. True overpeople presumably wouldn’t need overcoats to protect them, not from the elements or from all the hostile viruses that bio-armorers could devise.

  “That’s better,” Smith said as she joined him in the elevator that would take them down to ground level. Lisa had already noted that however smart the fibers of her new suit might be, it was perfectly staid in cut and color. It hugged her figure tightly on the inside, but on the outside, it was shaped like a conventional jacket and trousers, and she didn’t suppose that its almost-black color would look significantly brighter in daylight than it did beneath the soft yellow lights of the elevator cab.

  A patrol car was waiting for them. The driver switched his blue flashers on before setting forth into the traffic, but it didn’t accelerate their progress to any noticeable degree. The city streets were surprisingly busy, and the drivers of the other vehicles evidently didn’t feel under any obligation to get out of the way. Their onboard computers would be storing up instances of “contributory negligence” with the usual alacrity, but nobody seemed to care anymore. The improvements in road safety wrought by the ’38 Road Traffic Act had proved as temporary as the achievements of all its predecessors.

  Lisa finished off the dregs of the drink Ginny had given her. It had taken the edge off her appetite, but the pills hadn’t kicked in yet and she was still engaged in a constant struggle to remain fully alert.

  Unlike the Ahasuerus Foundation, the Institute of Algeny had not leased office space in an ultramodern building. Its governors had gone to the opposite extreme, buying a house in an upmarket residential area—which still looked like the private houses that surrounded it. The fact that its walls and gates were topped by razor wire didn’t seem at all unusual, given the similar levels of paranoia manifest by its neighbors. The tree-lined street in which it was located was obviously home to people who valued their privacy and took the business of property protection very seriously indeed.

  After being admitted to the house, Smith and Lisa were ushered into a room that could have passed for an ordinary suburban living room had it been equipped with a homestation, although the mock-antique furniture was the kind usually advertised on the shopping channels alongside discreetly cabineted, twentieth-century TV sets. It wasn’t until they were seated that their host introduced himself.

  “Matthias Geyer,” he said. “Delighted to meet you, Dr. Friemann. There are Friemanns in my family—perhaps we might be distantly related.” His accent was smooth and melodious, but quite distinct and deliberate.

  “I doubt it,” Lisa said.

  “But the ancestor who bequeathed the name to you never bothered to Anglicize it,” Geyer pointed out. Lisa wondered whether he was trying to recruit her as a potential ally, or making a point for Peter Grimmett Smith’s benefit.

  “No,” she admitted. “He never did.”

  Matthias Geyer was taller and slimmer than Dr. Goldfarb, but he wasn’t as tall or as angular as Peter Grimmett Smith. He was better looking and seemed considerably younger than either of them, although Lisa thought she detected signs of cosmetic somatic engineering on his cheeks and neck. If so, he was probably a forty-year-old determined to preserve the appearance of his twenty-five-year-old peak rather than a thirty-year-old devoted to clean living. He offered his guests a drink, and when they declined, he suggested that they might like something to eat, given that they must have missed dinner. When they declined that offer too, he bowed politely in recognition of their sense of urgency.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that misfortune has visited Professor Miller,” he said, now addressing himself—with what must have been calculated belatedness—to Peter Grimmett Smith. “I will, of course, do anything I can to assist his safe recovery. I would be devastated to think that his contact with our organization had anything to do with his disappearance.”

  “But you do recognize the possibility?” Smith said swiftly.

  “I fear so. What he told me was inexplicit, but he was clearly attempting to use an element of mystery to engage my interest. I could not say that he was dangling temptation before me, but he did go to some length to hint that when he spoke of negative results and blind alleys, he was not telling the whole story.”

  “And that’s what you reported back to Leipzig, is it?” Smith asked.

  “I am not required to report back to anyone,” Geyer informed them loftily. “I make my own decisions. Ours is not a centralized organization, like the Ahasuerus Foundation. Nor has it any principal base in Germany. We have come a long way from our roots, Mr. Smith—in every way.”

  Lisa wondered whether Geyer knew what they had been talking about in the helicopter. Even if there had been no other bug but Leland’s, it was possible that Leland was working for, or with, Geyer—but Geyer’s defensiveness was natural enough. He must have known that Smith would have made a comprehensive background check on his organization, and what it would have revealed.

  “What was it that Miller was trying to sell you?” Smith asked, unwilling for the moment to be sidetracked into a discussion of the Institute’s shady origins.

  “He made it perfectly clear that he was not trying to sell me anything,” Geyer corrected him. “He wanted to make a gift, of results accumulated over four decades, concerning a series of experiments he had conducted on mice and other animals.”

  “What other animals?” Lisa was quick to put in. Nobody else had mentipned other animals, and it was a long time since Miller had been involved with the creation of transgenic rabbits and sheep.

  “Dogs, I believe,” Geyer replied.

  “Dogs?” Lisa echoed skeptically. “The university hasn’t used dogs as experimental animals since the 2010 riot.”

  “What kind of experiments?” Smith asked, impatient with what seemed to him to be an irrelevant digression.

  “Professor Miller was calculatedly vague,” Geyer said apologetically. “He was insistent, however, that the work had a direct bearing on our core endeavors. He expressed concern that if our researchers did not know what he had tried to do and failed, they might waste years of effort following the same sterile path. It had once seemed such a promising line of research, he said, but had disappointed him grievously—and by virtue of its time-consuming nature, he could no longer carry it forward himself.”

  “Time-consuming nature?” Smith queried.

  Geyer raised his hands helplessly. “Given that he also contacted the Ahasuerus Foundation,” he said, “I could hardly help drawing the inference that he was speaking of a technology that would permit the extension of life, but he did not say so in so many words.”

  “But that is one of your so-called core concerns, isn’t it?” Smith’s suspicion that Geyer was being evasive was painfully obvious.

  “One of them,” Geyer readily conceded. “The founder of the Ahasuerus Foundation was rather narrowly interested in the possibility of human longevity, apparently assuming that human nature could be changed in that single respect without unduly affecting its other components. We have always taken the view that a more general transformation is desirable, of which longevity would not necessarily be the most important aspect.”

  “You’re more interested in breeding a master race than in simply helping every
one to live longer,” Smith said, not bothering to employ the kind of inflection that would have turned it into a rhetorical question.

  Geyer’s expression hardly changed, but Lisa put that down to stern self-control in the face of naked offensiveness. The pills were taking effect now, and she felt a certain tautness and tone returning to the muscles of her limbs and face. She hoped that the dose wouldn’t prove too great. She needed to have her wits about her; it wouldn’t do any good to be wide awake but too wired to maintain a proper balance.

  “If you’ll forgive me saying so, Mr. Smith,” Geyer said smoothly, “that’s the kind of observation one never hears anymore outside of England. Here, as in Germany, there is hardly anyone now alive who first learned to understand the world while Adolf Hitler was still in power. In four years’ time, a whole century will have elapsed since the end of World War Two. It’s time to put away the old insults, don’t you think? The purpose of the Institute of Algeny is to fund research in biotechnology that will assist the cause of human evolution.”

  “Point taken,” Smith said easily. “I take it that you’d rather I was equally careful to avoid the use of such terms as übermensch?”

  “Yes, I would,” Geyer said equably.

  “Even though your own publicity material describes algeny as a Nietzschean discipline and Thus Sprach Zarathustra as one of its inspirational documents?”

  “Even so,” Geyer conceded with the ghost of a smile.

  “Not that you have anything to hide, of course,” Smith persisted.