The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “A gun?” he spluttered. “That would be—”

  “Just give me the gun, John,” she said, dismissing any objections with a casual gesture of her wounded hand. “I need it.”

  He had to go into the bedroom to remove it from its hiding place. Citizen mice always kept their illicit guns in the bedroom, because the fear that moved them to arm themselves was that of waking up in the dead of night—as Lisa had done little more than twenty-four hours before—to find intruders in their home.

  “It’s just a dart gun,” Charleston explained unnecessarily as he handed it over. “Certified nonlethal. Everybody’s got one.”

  “It’ll do,” she assured him in a whisper. “Close the door behind me, very quietly, and stay close to it. If you hear shots, or if I don’t knock on your door again inside five minutes, hit Redial and tell the man I just spoke with to get over here as fast as he can. Whatever happens, you stay here. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said with soldierly alacrity.

  As soon as the door had closed behind her, she moved lightly up the stairs. She held the gun in her right hand, rather gingerly because the sealant between thumb and forefinger was starting to denature and it had become slightly sticky. She used her left hand to sort through her smartcards. She would still have to punch in the two combinations once her card had gone through the swipe slot, but she figured she could do that quietly enough. With luck, whoever was in her apartment wouldn’t know that he or she had company until Lisa actually opened the door.

  If the light was on, she would have to keep moving while she assessed the situation, making herself as difficult a target as possible. If not, she would have to flick the switch with her left hand while keeping the gun at the ready, and then—

  As soon as the door had opened by the merest crack, she knew the light was on, and she moved rapidly to her left as she pushed her way in, raising the gun to point it at the chest of the man who was rising from the armchair with an expression of startled horror on his face.

  But she didn’t fire. The continuing effect of the pills had combined with her adrenaline to boost her sky-high, and she felt well and truly wired, but she still had the presence of mind to freeze her finger on the trigger.

  Instead of firing the darter, she raised her left forefinger to her lips in an urgent gesture, imploring silence.

  Fortunately, Chan Kwai Keung had always been quick on the uptake, and he must have been expecting her for hours. He stifled his cry of recognition and nodded eagerly, to show that he understood. Lisa used the barrel of the gun to beckon him to the door, and she closed it behind them as quietly as she could. Then she shook her head and pointed downstairs. Chan nodded again.

  As soon as they reached the third-floor landing, Lisa knocked on John Charleston’s door. When he cracked it open, she thrust the gun through the narrow gap.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “All sorted out. No cause for alarm.”

  “Can I still keep it?” he asked tremulously—meaning, of course, the illicit gun.

  “Keep what?” she replied generously.

  Charleston wasn’t quite as quick on the uptake as Chan, but he was quick enough. “Oh,” he said feebly. The direction of his gaze switched to Chan’s face. “Right. Thanks. You’re okay now?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Neither of us was ever here, okay?”

  “Absolutely,” he assured her.

  Lisa waited until she’d eased the car out on the road again before turning to Chan and saying: “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” The adrenaline should have abated by now, but it hadn’t. The pills had thrown her entire system out of kilter, and she was locked like a crazy lemming or a snowshoe hare on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was on the edge, and she wasn’t going to get off until she had seen the affair through to its bitter end.

  Chan winced at the rawness of her tone. He seemed genuinely chastened. “I am very sorry,” he said, punctilious in his diction even now. “I did not know what to do for the best. I thought you would know, so I tried … I really had no idea those crazy people would try to snatch me the way they snatched Morgan. I was naive, I suppose—but that made me all the more anxious. As soon as I got out of the parking area, I ran like the wind. At first I expected you home in a couple of hours. Then, when you failed to turn up, I thought you must have been shot. I did not know what to do.”

  “How did you get in? Those locks are supposed to be unhackable.”

  “You should change your pass codes more often,” Chan chided her, “and your smartcard needs to be at least twice as smart as it is. But that is not important. Where have you been?”

  “That’s not important. What’s important is why you’re playing silly cloak-and-dagger games while there’s a full-scale crisis on. What on earth have you got to hide?”

  Dawn had turned to daylight now, but the light was gray and cold and utterly unwelcoming. It was less than a week to All Hallows’ Eve, but the weather should still have been relatively benign. This was like a return to the old days, before the greenhouse effect really took hold—but that was no reason for the dead not to hold to their calendar and keep to their graves. The world had no right to be turning topsy-turvy.

  “They bombed Mouseworld,” Chan said in a whisper. “If it had just been Morgan, and Ed … but when I was told they had bombed Mouseworld, that was when I knew it had to be my fault. It had to be that crazy old experiment, not the ones we were doing for Ed Burdillon. If it had only been the work we were doing for Ed … but how did they ever find out?”

  “I don’t have the time, Chan,” Lisa said sternly. “You’ll have to do better than this. What crazy old experiment?”

  “It was my idea,” he was quick to say. He continued so rapidly as the car sped along Wellsway toward Entry Hill that Lisa wondered whether her hearing had somehow gone into fast-forward. “I had to let Morgan in on it, but it was entirely my idea. We had to do it secretly, even if it meant breaking the law, because the department would never have given us permission. Mouseworld had become a sacred cow, untouchable—but that was pointless, do you see? As soon as all four populations had stabilized, there was no further point in the replication. If they had continued to behave differently, it would have been a different matter, but they did not. And there was so much more that might be done! Four cities: two experimental samples, two controls. What an opportunity! How could we let it go to waste? But the Departmental Committee could never have agreed. If there had ever been a majority to concede the principle, it would have fallen apart as soon as the question was raised as to which of countless imaginable experiments should be carried out. The only way that progress could be made was for one or two individuals to do what needed to be done in secret. All mice look alike among so many … and the people keeping track had ceased to do anything but count. It was so easy, Lisa, so very easy.”

  Lisa felt completely numb. Time ceased to race and became suddenly still. So it was not unthinkable, after all, that Morgan had kept a secret from her for forty years—and not unthinkable, either, that Chan had kept it from her too. But even that revelation was marginally less shocking than the other. Morgan Miller and Chan Kwai Keung had subverted the Mouseworld experiment! They had taken it over, for their own secret purposes, without telling anyone what they were doing, or why. For thirty or forty years—presumably ever since the so-called “chaotic fluctuations” of the zero years—the four cities of Mouseworld had been running their own experiment instead of, or at the very least alongside of, the one they were supposed to be running. What kind of deception was that?

  “What experiment?” Lisa demanded tersely. She hadn’t time to digress.

  Chan went on, speaking faster than he had ever spoken before, at least within earshot of Lisa. “I had developed a new and unprece-dentedly versatile system of antibody packaging. It was not very closely akin to the new method Edgar Burdillon has been helping to test, but it was sufficiently close to make us uncomfortable when Ed asked for our help with his ne
w project. I am sworn to secrecy regarding that new project, of course, but I think that the broad outlines of the old experiment, at least, can be divulged without breaking that oath. I would not have you told at the time, because you were a police officer and it would have put you in an awkward ethical position, but if this is why Morgan has been kidnapped … well, it must suffice to say I thought I had devised a new and better approach to the problem of antibody packaging, and that I had high hopes for its utility. The world was still rife with natural infectious diseases in those days. I could not have been so optimistic had I come across it twenty years later, when the vast majority of those evils had been defeated by other means. I thought it an elegant method, but it involved importing a cumbersome package of new DNA into the superficial tissues of any carrier. The mouse models I constructed in order to study the efficiency of the system and its various side effects thrived, but there were certain ambiguities of effect that made me regret deeply that I could study them only in isolation, in interaction with one another. In order that the efficacy of the system could be properly tested, I needed to discover how the models would cope with a more realistic context. Do you see what I mean?”

  Lisa turned left into Bradford Road, wondering why they had made so little progress. How much time was actually passing while the cracks in the surface of her being widened and spread? Did she see what he meant, or was it only the false kind of intuition she sometimes experienced in dreams?

  “I see,” she said. “Knockout mice are perfect models of genetic-deficiency diseases, but the efficacy of antibody-packaging systems can only be assessed in the context of a whole population—ideally, a population under stress. And there you were, spending hours every day in a room whose four walls showed stable populations under stress, all of them running smoothly in the same ancient groove. So you decided to convert two of them into experimental populations by introducing your own transformed mice to see how they would get on.”

  “Only one,” Chan said. “I wanted to split the replicates two and two, but Morgan insisted that my intervention should be minimal. I introduced the transformed mice into Paris. Technically, it was a criminal act in that it bypassed the university’s Ethics Committee as well as the Departmental Committee, but I thought it criminal in a higher sense that the Mouseworld experiment had been allowed to stagnate. I insisted that you be kept out of it, Lisa, because I knew you could not countenance any such argument in your professional capacity, but I hope you can see that my conviction was deep and sincere.”

  “Cut the crap and tell me what happened to the fucking mice,” Lisa instructed him brutally. Bradford Road was giving way to North Road and her rendezvous with Mike was only a few hundred yards away. Her onboard computer still had not registered a single offense.

  “They died,” Chan said in a hurt tone. “They could not survive among the citizen mice. The reason, I believe—”

  She hadn’t time to listen to speculation. The fact was all that mattered. “So the experiment failed? It was a complete bust—and please don’t feed me that crap about there being no failed experiments in science.”

  “It was a failure,” he admitted. “It did not seem significant at the time, when Morgan and I were trying so many different things, but—”

  “But when Ed Burdillon roped you into testing his new antibody-packaging system, you couldn’t help wondering whether it would run into exactly the same problem. So you—and I do mean you, in the narrow sense—were thrown into paroxysms of doubt as to whether you ought to confess to your ancient crime, on the off chance that it might save the Containment Commission from pinning all its hopes on a nonstarter. Except, of course, you couldn’t quite figure out who to confess it to—and when the lunatics who snatched Morgan also took the trouble to torch the evidence of your ancient crime, you really got your knickers in a twist. And that, to cut a long guilt trip short, is when you finally thought of me.” The junction of North End Road and Ralph Allen’s Drive was visible now, and she could see Mike Grundy’s car, parked and waiting.

  “I thought you would know what to do,” Chan said lamely. “I did not.”

  “For a certified genius,” Lisa said angrily, “you truly are completely fucking stupid. I really used to look up to you, you know?” She was extremely annoyed with herself, because she knew this was a bad time to be fighting back tears of frustration and disappointment. It didn’t make her feel any better to know that neither Peter Grimmett Smith nor Mike Grundy would have had the faintest idea of what she was on the verge of crying about. The only person who could possibly have understood was Morgan.

  “Yes,” Chan admitted miserably. “I know.”

  “I wish I had time to figure out exactly what the hell you’re talking about, and whether it matters,” she said as she brought the car to a lurching halt at the junction, “but I don’t. I have to spring Morgan, and I only have a couple of hours to do it in. So I’m going to hand you over to Mike, and he’ll take you to Peter Grimmett Smith. You tell Smith everything, except maybe where you saw me last. You can give him my apologies for not being there to translate your explanations for him, and for not being there period. But tell him it really is for the best that I do this now and do it alone. Tell him I’ll be in touch as soon as I can, and that if I haven’t returned by nightfall with Morgan in tow, we’re probably both dead.”

  “Do you mean that?” Chan asked anxiously.

  “Yes, I do,” she said, although she really wasn’t sure, given that her internal Weather was crazy lemming through and through and that she couldn’t really be sure of anything anymore. “And although it won’t be all your fault, you certainly won’t have helped. Now come on”

  Third Interlude

  HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

  By the time she’d been at her new university for a fortnight, Lisa had figured out why Morgan Miller didn’t wear a lab coat. It was, as she’d instantly suspected, far more than any mere absentminded omission or some petty desire to stand out from the crowd by refusing to accept its uniform.

  In Morgan Miller’s view, Lisa eventually deduced, wearing a lab coat implied that being a scientist was a kind of job: something that one put on and took off according to a circadian rhythm of work and leisure. He refused to give tacit license to any such implication. It also suggested that the clothes worn underneath it were more precious than the coat itself, requiring protection from the vicissitudes of laboratory life. Morgan Miller regarded clothes in an icily utilitarian light; he bought his outfits as cheaply as possible, and was not above shopping at market stalls and charity shops. If one of his shirts or a pair of flannel trousers were stained by a laboratory accident, he simply threw them away. He never wore a jacket. Nor did he ever wear T-shirts or jeans, even though it would not have been a violation of his utilitarian principles, because he considered such garments to be key components of the image projected by uncommitted students.

  In the course of the first few weeks of their acquaintance, Lisa became as fascinated by her new supervisor as she ever had been by any male of the species. She never deigned to consider the hypothesis that the fascination in question might be classifiable as “love,” because she did not consider herself to be the kind of person who might be vulnerable to the horrible indignities of falling or being in love, but that only made its intensity more fascinating. After her own admittedly peculiar fashion, Lisa was as committed a utilitarian as Morgan Miller, and she viewed the fascination that Miller exercised upon her in a conscientiously cold light, as something that would assist her learning.

  Lisa’s friends and relatives had, of course, always assured her that she was merely a slow developer, and that she would begin to believe in love as soon as the feeling first took hold of her, but she had never taken platitudinous advice seriously and her response to her supervisor could not change her mind. She had always retorted, in the face of such obviously misconceived advice, that “love” was merely a species of psychological dependence, cultivated as much by anxiety as hormonal flux.
She had no intention of becoming dependent on Morgan Miller, who was probably not a dependable person in any other respect than the purely professional.

  Her observations to date had suggested to her that other women fell in love purely because they cared too much about what men thought of them, suffering adrenaline rushes whenever they thought they were being ignored or insulted: rushes that were not chemically different from those they felt when they became the focus of attention or received a compliment, but which they interpreted very differently when sensation became thought. Lisa cared only about what Morgan Miller thought about her ability as a scientist, and she construed his occasional compliments and insults as mere witticisms of no personal consequence.

  He obviously liked that in her, but it was equally obvious that he was far too wise a man to fall in love, especially with a putative soul-mate.

  Love, in the opinions to which Lisa held firm at the age of twenty-two and Morgan Miller at the age of thirty-four, was merely a matter of self-conditioning and of learned helplessness. Neither of them wanted anything to do with it.

  Sex, of course, was a different matter—so different that they wasted little time in courtship before leaping into bed together.

  Morgan Miller explained to Lisa, in dribs and drabs, that he had made an irrevocable decision never to get married. This was not so much because he considered his vocation essentially monkish—although he did have a distinct ascetic streak—but because he could see no virtue or purpose in the institution of marriage other than to provide protective cover for children. He was the kind of man who felt obliged to practice what he preached, and it would have been a flagrant violation of his neoMalthusian credo to bring more children into a world that was heading for a population crisis, so there was no earthly need for him to get married. To do so, even if he made his intentions clear to his intended spouse, would have constituted a misrepresentation of sorts. Even a long-term monogamous relationship without benefit of ceremony would have been a compromise reeking of bad faith. He had, of course, taken the precaution of obtaining a vasectomy, by courtesy of the local Marie S topes Clinic, but that had not been sufficient to clarify his peculiar conscience, so he explained to Lisa with all due alacrity that he did not intend to enter into a long-term relationship with her, and would terminate their arrangement if ever it seemed likely to become habitual.