The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  She was not surprised to discover that Salomey was a clothing shop, specializing in ultrasmart costumes for ultrasmart women. A notice on the automatic door informed customers that THIS IS A WOMEN-ONLY SHOP, but that wasn’t unusual nowadays. The special intimacy of smart fabrics had given birth to a new modesty, and had brought a backlash in favor of privacy that had drawn many new kinds of social boundaries.

  The Real Woman who watched Lisa from the purchase desk as she crossed the smart-carpeted floor to the dressing room looked completely out of place. Even if she hadn’t been so powerfully built, she would have stood out simply because she didn’t look as diffident as the younger sales assistants obviously fighting boredom while they waited for opening time. A clock on the wall told Lisa that the time was now eight thirty-five.

  The woman waiting in the dressing room wasn’t a bodybuilder, but that didn’t detract from the frank hostility and meanness of her gaze.

  “Strip,” she instructed.

  Lisa peeled off the smartsuit supplied by the Swindon police. She braced herself for yet another dose of censorious advice about her style sense, but was pleasantly surprised for once. The one-woman reception committee gave her naked body the once-over with some kind of sweeper before handing her a brand-new outfit. It was a smart, dark-red one-piece, far more expensive and stylish than anything she’d ever have dreamed of buying. Had she not been so ruthless in excising all twentieth-century cliches from her vocabulary, it would have made her feel like mutton dressed as lamb.

  The woman to whom she’d given her old one-piece took it away. It was another, even younger woman who came in to peel back the carpet, exposing the trapdoor set in the floor of the room.

  “You got me dressed up like this and you want to take me down into the sewers?” Lisa asked, feigning astonishment.

  “You can walk through a sewer in a Salomey outfit and come up as lovely as a bird of paradise and as fresh as a golden rose,” the woman told her, straight-faced. “It says so in our catalogue.”

  “That’s a relief,” said Lisa as she lowered herself into the opening, searching with what seemed to her to be stockinged feet for the rungs of the ladder. “In my day, birds of paradise still existed in the wild, and freshness standards were set by daisies—but everything’s artificial these days.”

  It transpired, however, that the well beneath Salomey did not lead to the sewers at all. It led to a dimly lit, stone-clad tunnel that extended in a southeastern direction. To begin with, the tunnel was conspicuously clean and obviously new, but its storeroom-lined walls gave access within a hundred meters to brick-lined spaces of an ancient cast.

  Lisa remembered the days when permission had first been granted for the construction of the mall, and she tried to recall the controversies that had raged around the project. There had been a convent on the north side of North Parade Road, she remembered. Deconsecrated and sold off by the cash-strapped Church Commissioners, it had briefly become the site of a rescue dig by archaeologists from the university before its crypt had been abandoned as a supposedly untouchable enclave within the stockholding cellars. Once out of public sight, the place had obviously fallen prey to the combined forces of economic convenience and the new privacy.

  “The crypts of a nunnery overlaid and overlapped by a shopping mall,” she said to her guide. “You brought Morgan Miller to face the feminist inquisition in the cellars of a bloody nunnery.” This, she thought, was a decision that had Arachne West’s stamp on it.

  “Quiet,” her guide instructed, although the command was pointless. If Lisa had still been carrying some kind of bug, the people listening in to it wouldn’t have required any verbal cues to help them figure out where she was.

  The doors in the various sections of the cellar complex were far more modern than the brickwork that contained them, and they bore fancy combination locks. The guide conducted her through two of them before coaxing open a third. She waited outside to close it again once Lisa was inside, but Lisa wasn’t entirely convinced of the impregnability of the inner sanctum to which she was admitted. There was probably more than one way in, and there were probably too many people who knew the codes.

  There was no sign of ancient brickwork inside the cosy cell. Its walls had been coated with some kind of artificial plastic, a pale green in color. Against one wall there was a semicircular desk; its generous size took up slightly more than half the available space, effectively reducing the rest to the status of a short, curved corridor. There was yet another inner room on the far side, similarly secured with a certified-unhackable double lock.

  There was no one seated behind the desk to monitor the various screens mounted therein, but Arachne West was sitting on top of it. She was still bald, of course, but now that she was in her late forties, the baldness looked almost natural. What didn’t look natural was the velvety-black Salomey outfit she was wearing. It should have been highly polished synthetic leather, Lisa thought, or some kind of paramilitary uniform. Arachne wasn’t so much mutton dressed as lamb as lion dressed as kitten, but the effect was just as false.

  “My mother always told me it was dangerous to talk to policemen,” the Real Woman said, “but kids never listen, do they?”

  “The advice was bad,” Lisa told her. “You should have ignored it entirely. Where’s Helen?”

  “I told her she ought to try to make a getaway before she’s installed on top of the ‘Most Wanted’ list. It was good to have the excuse—she’d become a liability since we had to make it clear to her that she wasn’t running the show anymore. So why was Mama’s advice bad?”

  “If you’d come to me when Stella and Helen first persuaded you that Morgan had something worth stealing,” Lisa told her, “we could have avoided every sad act of this ridiculous farce. I could have talked to him for you.”

  “You’d been talking to him for thirty-nine years,” Arachne pointed out. “I was on your side to begin with—I thought Stella and Helen might be letting personal matters affect their judgment—but in the end, I didn’t think I knew you well enough to know for sure which side you’d be on when the chips were down. You never let me get that close. You always kept me at arm’s length.”

  “I was never convinced that you didn’t have designs on my body,” Lisa said. “What clinched the crazy deal? What’s this proof Stella thinks she has of my complicity with Morgan’s allegedly unholy schemes? You must have figured out after you bugged my belt that I don’t know a damn thing.”

  “You had your ovaries stripped, and the eggs frozen,” the Real Woman told her unhesitatingly. “There didn’t seem to be any reason for you to do that unless you were in on Miller’s grand plan. Stella had her own account of why he gave up on the dogs, which seemed plausible enough to those of us who remembered the old ALF riots. Did you know that Helen Grundy was the social worker responsible for the woman convicted after the riot at the East Central campus way back in ’15? Do people still say it’s a small world, or is that too twentieth century? Pure coincidence, of course—but that’s the whole thing in a nutshell, isn’t it? If you stick around long enough, the coincidences accumulate. Nobody can tell anymore what’s significant and what’s not. Once the dogs were off the menu, Stella said, Miller had to use mice or human embryos. She reckoned that your eggs might be supplying him with raw material as well as giving you the chance to save up for the big payoff. As for the bugged belt—you might have been running a double bluff. People who know they’ve been tagged can turn the leak to their own purposes, if they’re clever enough. You’re a cop, after all. You’re paranoid, I’m very paranoid, Stella and Helen are extremely paranoid. When the whole world turns paranoid, everybody begins to see things that aren’t there—especially conspiracies.”

  “But you, Helen, and Stella really are a conspiracy, aren’t you?” Lisa pointed out. “How many others are involved? At first I thought eight or ten, but now I’m beginning to think forty or fifty.”

  “You have to fight fire with fire,” Arachne West informed her
solemnly. Beneath her slowly fading musculature, there seemed to be a twentieth-century thinker—but how could that be, when Arachne wouldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old when the century turned?

  Maybe, Lisa thought, it’s the century itself that won’t die, having embedded its cliches far too deeply in the very fabric of social thought. On the other hand, perhaps the people who lived in twentieth-century England spent just as much time berating themselves and one another for a host of leftover Victorian attitudes that weren’t at all what they seemed to be.

  “We’re wasting time,” she pointed out.

  “I know,” the Real Woman replied. “Sometimes I think that’s all we’ve done for the last twenty years while everyone just waited for the war to break out. Now it has—and are we ready? Are we hell?”

  Lisa knew that the “we” in question wasn’t just the two of them, or the Real Women, or the entire population of radfemdom, and it might even include a few males of the species.

  “According to Leland, private enterprise is ready,” Lisa told her. “Whatever containment measures the commission finally recommends will be irrelevant. The lovely people who brought you the kind of fabrics you ‘could wear in a sewer and still come up as lush as a golden rose’ have their new season all planned out. Suits that protect you from the plague—in all its myriad forms—will be the next big thing. You don’t have to contain the evil germs if the people can contain themselves. You needn’t worry about hidden eugenic strategies, though. Private enterprise will sell to anyone, provided they have the money. And who doesn’t, when it’s your money or your life? There may yet be a little worm in the bud, unfortunately.”

  “What worm?”

  “I didn’t have time to get the whole story, but Chan’s already tested some kind of versatile antibody-packaging system in the only kind of context that really counts. It didn’t work. Maybe the suitskin system will screw up. You can never change just one thing, you see, and you can never tell how far the unanticipated consequences will extend.”

  “Stella told us about the war work Miller was doing for Burdillon,” Arachne admitted. “She thought that was what had finally persuaded him to give up on the other thing.”

  “Can I go in now?” Lisa asked. “I’d rather like to get it over with before the guys break down all the doors and start blazing away in every direction.”

  “He really didn’t tell you anything at all, did he?” the Real Woman said wonderingly. “And you never thought to go digging, the way Stella did. You could have winkled it out forty years ago, if you’d only thought to look. Lisa the policeman, scourge of all the murderers and Leverers in Bristol, overlooks the crime of the century on her own doorstep! What a fool you must feel.”

  “Okay,” Lisa conceded ungraciously. “I’m a fool. It’s way past time to repair my sins of omission. Do I get to see him now?”

  “Be my guest,” the bald woman said tiredly. “You’d better change his dressing before you start, though. The anesthetic’s probably worn off and you won’t get much out of him while he’s all racked up. That was Helen’s idea—but if and when the time comes, I won’t be trying to duck responsibility on the grounds that I was just an innocent bystander.”

  Arachne’s tone had changed. The last vestiges of graveyard humor had vanished. Her pale eyes were still locked on Lisa’s stare, but it wasn’t a competition. The Real Woman knew how badly this whole operation had screwed up, but she wasn’t looking for a way out. She was just seeing it through to its end.

  Lisa accepted the medical kit and water bottle that Arachne hauled out from behind the desk, along with the smartcard that would complete the deactivation of the inner room’s locks, provided the code numbers had already been loaded.

  “I hope it isn’t too painful,” the bald woman said. “Unlike the loose cannon, I never had anything against you.”

  Lisa wasn’t certain whether Arachne was talking about the sight that would greet her when she passed through the door, or the truth that would finally be told once she got to interrogate Morgan Miller.

  “I can take it,” she said, figuring that the reply would do in either case.

  Arachne West swung her sturdy legs over the desk and slipped into a seat behind one of the screens. Lisa had no doubt that it was a position from which the Real Woman would be able to see and hear everything that transpired in the cell where Morgan Miller was confined. She didn’t mind. There had been far too many secrets for far too long. It was high time that everything was brought out in the open.

  She passed the smartcard through the swipe slot, and the door obligingly clocked open. She went through it and closed it behind her.

  It was as if she were closing the door on all sixty-one years of her carefully accumulated past.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The cell was gloomier by far than the anteroom. The bare brick had been carefully preserved here in all its brutal simplicity. The temperature seemed to have dropped by five degrees as Lisa crossed the threshold.

  Morgan Miller was lying on a tubular-steel foldaway bed not unlike the one in which Leland had installed Stella Filisetti. He wasn’t secured to the frame by smart cords, but that was because he wasn’t in any condition to do anything as stupid as attacking his captors. The sleeve of the unsmart shirt he was wearing had been ripped from shoulder to cuff to expose his right arm, which was folded very carefully across his chest, exposing a long series of burns that looked as if they had been etched by a blowtorch. Some kind of dressing had been applied to the wounds, but the synthetic flesh hadn’t been able to bond properly. It had mopped up blood and other fluids that had leaked from the wounds, but its capacity to metabolize them had been overloaded. Even its painkilling capabilities had been overstretched.

  When he first caught sight of Lisa, a hopeful gleam came into Morgan’s eyes, but it dwindled almost immediately to a mere ember of endurance. Even the benign mental chemistry of hope could be converted by injury into a source of pain.

  Lisa knelt beside the bed and opened the medical kit. She drew off the useless pseudoskin as carefully as she could—not quite carefully enough, to judge by Morgan’s ragged breathing—and substituted a generous helping of gel. Only then was Morgan able to open his eyes again. He seemed to have been utterly drained of all physical resources—a considerable indignity for a man who had fondly imagined that he was as fit as a flea. It was an effort for him to raise his head and take a few sips from the plastic bottle.

  “Shit, Morgan,” Lisa murmured. “Why didn’t you just tell them what they wanted to know?”

  “What kind of fool do you take me for?” he whispered as he let his head sink back again. “I told them everything before they even turned the flame in my direction. I told them the absolute truth—but they wouldn’t believe me. I found out a couple of hours too late that the only way to deal with torture is to tell the fuckers what they want to hear, not what they want to know.”

  “Shit,” said Lisa again. She had never felt so helpless.

  “I told them you didn’t have anything to do with it,” Miller said, urgency raising his voice. “They weren’t in a mood to take my word for anything. If I’d said that two plus two was four, they’d have got out their calculators.”

  “It’s okay, Morgan,” Lisa said. “I’m here of my own free will. I came as soon as I figured out which of my old friends and acquaintances were involved. The cavalry won’t be far behind. The farce is almost over. Arachne’s people were panicked into precipitate action, but they’ve calmed down now. We’ll be okay.”

  “It was a mistake,” Morgan said. “That little fool Stella guessed half the story and didn’t have the imagination to look for the twist in the tail. I told them the truth, but they started burning me anyway, and they kept right on no matter what I said. I had to try something else, and when that didn’t work … by then, I wasn’t in any condition to come up with anything they might find convincing. I tried, but…”

  “It’s okay, Morgan.”

 
“They still won’t believe it, Lisa. Your being here won’t make any difference. They won’t believe that I did what I did for the reasons I did it. They’re too paranoid.”

  “There’s a war on,” Lisa reminded him. “The fact that the government won’t admit it yet only makes it that much more terrifying—and the fact that the MOD is ten or twenty years behind the new cutting edge of defense research doesn’t help. If you know why Chan’s versatile-packaging system was a nonstarter, you’re in a better position than I am to guess whether the new systems will fare any better, but the likes of Helen Grundy and Arachne West don’t have any reason to believe that they’re high on anyone’s list of defense priorities. They’re entitled to their paranoia—and it wasn’t just Stella’s prying that made you into a plausible target. You should have told me, Morgan. This farce has trashed my life. All the gray power in England couldn’t save me from the scrap heap now. Whatever it is, you should have told me.”

  “I know that now,” he said. He was speaking a little more comfortably; the painkillers administered by the smart dressing had restored what remained of his equilibrium. He was even able to raise his head from the pillow again and prop himself up on his left elbow. “The smartsuit’s a mistake, though,” he added. “It’s nice, but it’s not your

  “You wouldn’t know,” she said bitterly. “So concentrate on what you do know. Stella and Helen might not have been able to recognize the truth when they heard it from your lying lips, but I can. Tell me the truth. Explain to me how come I’ve known you for thirty-nine years without ever being able to see what a sly hypocrite you are.”

  “I’m truly sorry,” Morgan said, letting his voice fall to a whisper again. “But Chan was right about that, if nothing else. You were a police officer. It wouldn’t have been right to let you in on anything that would have compromised your integrity. Maybe it was only a technical offense, but it was an offense nevertheless. You were so entranced by that stupid experiment that I was never sure of how you’d react to the news that I’d already subverted it. As time went by, it became harder and harder to confess that I’d been keeping the secret for so long. I never told Chan either—and he was too trusting to ever suspect that the real reason I wouldn’t let him introduce his experimental mice into two of the mouse cities was that I’d already introduced mine into London and Rome. Anyway, there really are secrets so nasty that the only safe place to keep them is the one between your ears.”