The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “He’s a pro, Helen. He wouldn’t bargain with you if he didn’t have to—and he wouldn’t have to, even if you had something to sell. Which you don’t. All you’re doing here is letting your side down and trying to foul things up even worse than they are already.”

  Helen’s wild eyes were growing even wilder. She had obviously realized that Lisa wasn’t going to hand anything over, whether she had anything to hand or not. The script that she’d formulated in anticipation of the confrontation had let her down, and she didn’t know what to do. In the movies, the people holding the guns always got the respect they deserved, and if the people who were on the wrong end of the barrel were slow to cooperate, the people with the guns simply knocked them about a bit more and rummaged through their pockets and pouches until they found what they were looking for—but Helen Grundy had already cottoned on to the fact that Lisa wasn’t going to make any effort to oblige her. She was afraid that if she tried to carry forward the fight with anything less than a bullet, Lisa would win—and no matter what she thought about the amount of pleasure it would give her to shoot her ex-husband’s good and loyal friend, she was exactly the kind of person to whom the logic of rational deterrence applied. She was trying to get out of trouble, not deeper in—and she knew, even if she couldn’t quite admit it to herself, that she wasn’t going to get out. No matter what she did, she was in trouble. She had been reckless in running up her moral debts, and now the account was due for payment.

  That, at least, was the way Lisa calculated the situation—so the fact that Helen actually fired the gun caused her considerable annoyance as well as a horrid thrill of pure terror.

  Fortunately, the analysis had been fundamentally correct, and Helen had been careful to raise the barrel of the gun before firing, so that the bullet went over Lisa’s head and smashed into the lintel above the door to Morgan Miller’s prison.

  “Leland probably heard that,” Lisa observed when her nerves were calm enough to permit speech. “If he didn’t figure out where we went before, he will now.”

  Leland wasn’t the only one who had heard the shot. The door through which Lisa had come hadn’t closed again, although it had swung back so that it stood ajar. Now it opened wide again, and Arachne West came through it with her own gun raised and ready to fire.

  The Real Woman had pressed the barrel of her weapon to the back of Helen Grundy’s neck before she realized who it was that she was covering. Her command to drop the gun was overtaken by a disgusted curse, which emerged in a form that was semi-articulate at best.

  Helen dropped her gun anyway. She seemed relieved to be required to do it, although she had to know what an admission of failure it was.

  “Like some rat or lemming the day after the crash begins,” Lisa observed drily. “Running this way and that, going nowhere, lashing out at anything within range. No direction at all. Self-destruction born of panic.”

  “You haven’t even started!” Arachne West accused her.

  “No,” Lisa admitted. “I didn’t even get to start.” She reached into the pocket on her thigh and pulled the wafer out, displaying it to Helen Grundy. “Surprise!” she said. But Helen didn’t look surprised at all.

  Arachne took the wafer and vaulted over the desk to reach the copier that would allow her to duplicate it repeatedly. “I gave the van driver the slip,” she said, “but they had a pretty good idea of where we are even before you set up the audible signpost. We still have half a chance while they’re trying to make their way through the maze, though. Pick up the gun, Lisa.”

  Lisa knelt down carefully. She didn’t dare duck her head precipitately while it was still aching from the clumsy blow Helen Grundy had given her. She picked up the gun, but took due note of the fact that if anyone came hurtling through the door with heroism on his mind, she would be the first target to attract attention. Arachne had a switch within easy reach that would engage the door’s locks, but she hadn’t touched it—presumably because the idea of being locked in while the corridor filled with ambushers was even less appealing than the prospect of reckless heroic intervention.

  Lisa contemplated asking Arachne to open the inner door, but it was probably safer to leave Morgan locked in. That way, he’d be okay no matter what happened in the outer room if or when Leland and his taciturn friend arrived on the threshold.

  Arachne fed the wafer into the computer. She began decanting information onto the local disk before opening the connection to a subsidiary station that would allow her to transfer data slot to slot.

  The sound of a slightly muffled explosion made Lisa start. “He’s shooting his way in!” she exclaimed.

  “He can’t hack the locks,” Arachne told her, her calmness exaggerated by concentration. “He’s in too much of a hurry to be subtle. He’s a way off yet.”

  No sooner had she finished speaking, though, than a second explosion sounded. Alarm bells now began to sound in profusion. The cityplex police would be on their way—but Leland had already pointed out that their response times left something to be desired, and the lunch-time crowds in the mall would be panicking by now. Aboveground, everything would be chaos and confusion.

  The alarms weren’t loud enough to block out the sound of another door being taken off its hinges. This one seemed very close. Lisa had been aware for some time that Ginny’s pills had worn off, but while she was moving, she hadn’t lost her momentum. Now that she had nothing to do but stand still, the letdown could no longer be put off. She felt as if a heavy blanket had descended upon her. The sharp pain caused by Helen Grundy’s clumsy blow had become oppressively dull and constant now, and she had to clench her left fist tight, digging her fingernails into her palm, to fight the deadening numbness. She still needed help, though—and help came.

  “Dr. Friemann!”

  The raised voice came from the corridor; it was loud and clear enough to dash any hope that its owner didn’t know exactly where they were, and the jolt it delivered to Lisa’s slowing heart restored the sharpness of her consciousness so completely as to make the situation seem surreal and hallucinatory.

  Lisa immediately eased Helen Grundy to one side and went past her to the doorway. She took the gun with her, but she held it limply at arm’s length, pointed at the floor.

  She was relieved to note, once she was outside the door, that Leland was alone, and that his own already-raised weapon was a dart gun like the one the Real Woman had been carrying in the parking lot—so alike, in fact, that it was presumably the same one.

  Leland looked down at the dart gun apologetically. “Cheap Bulgarian crap,” he observed, “but it fires straight enough.”

  “One copy only,” Lisa said immediately. “All the experimental data, plus a map of the retrovirus. You take it and you leave. You’ll have everything we have—and as far as anyone else is concerned, you weren’t even here.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” he said. “Were you with them all along, or have you been turned?”

  “Neither,” Lisa told him. “I’m just trying to make the best of a bad situation. You’ll have to trust my judgment that it’s a good deal. After all, I know what it is and you don’t—yet. It is worth fighting for—or against, depending on your point of view—so I’m not going to let you monopolize it. I’ll shoot you if necessary, and this isn’t a dart gun. If you take a copy and go, nobody gets hurt. It’s a good offer, Leland.”

  “I’m probably a much better shot than you are,” Leland observed. “Even with a piece of crap like this. Don’t be fool enough to think you can shoot back before the drug takes effect. The dart would knock you over at this range. It might even kill you—do you know how many deaths are caused by supposedly nonlethal weaponry?”

  “Of course I do,” said Lisa, “but the radfems have three more guns inside and they’re real marksmen. They consider me expendable. They know they’re cornered, but if you hang around too long, the police will be here, and getting all tangled up would be a really bad idea. One copy, and you leave. Go far
and go fast.”

  Leland shrugged. “Suits me,” he said. “I’m glad it’s you. I’m not sure I could trust anyone else not to hand me a blank.” If it was a threat, it was delicately couched.

  Lisa, of course, had to trust Arachne West not to hand her a blank when she stuck her arm around the door. She passed the wafer she received to Leland without bothering to wonder.

  “I’ll have to check it in the van,” Leland said as he took it. “If it looks okay, I’m gone. As you said, I was never even here.” He was already moving back into the subterranean maze. As he disappeared, he called back: “I’ll be in touch about that job.”

  When Lisa stepped back inside, it was a resentful Helen Grundy who asked, “What job?”

  “You cost me mine,” Lisa pointed out. “Maybe you ought to congratulate yourself for that. If I hadn’t been finished in the police force, I might not have been so nice when I phoned you or so pliable when I turned up here. Can Arachne assume that you’re back on board now that you have nothing left to rat her out with?”

  “If that man works for a megacorp,” Mike Grundy’s ex-wife observed, “there’s no way anybody we can give it to will be able to work through the data before they do. They’ll have the weapon before we have a defense, and they’ll be halfway up the ladder to a workable emortality treatment before we’re clear of the first rung.”

  “There is no workable emortality treatment, Helen,” Lisa informed her quietly. “Not by this route. If forty years of Morgan Miller’s ingenuity couldn’t get the merest glimpse of a fix, the resources of the vastest megacorp in the world won’t turn one up any time soon. He told Goldfarb and Geyer the simple truth. As a way of extending human life, it’s a dead end. Our personalities are formed by the closure of synapses, the withering of alternative pathways. Our memories are sculpted, not piled up. Rejuvenation of the brain wipes out everything but instinct. It’s a weapon, Helen—that and nothing more. It’s not the radfem Holy Grail. It’s just a poisoned chalice. I don’t believe anyone will ever use it, but I do believe that handing it over to Leland has further decreased the already slight probability. The people he works for are committed One Worlders. When they go to war—if they haven’t already—they’ll do so with that end in mind. They’ll use dirty tricks by the thousand, but I don’t believe they’ll use this one. It’s not compatible with their ultimate aim. If anyone else tries to use it, or threatens to use it, the Cabal will be better placed to put a stop to it than anyone else. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that’s the way I see it. Even so, I’ll be even happier if those copies Arachne is making are delivered into as many sympathetic hands as possible. A solid defense is the best foundation for any campaign.”

  “Can you get a job for Mike too?” Helen Grundy asked, using up her last reserves of malice. “He’ll be needing one, won’t he?”

  “He can look after himself,” Lisa assured her. “But if I can help him, I will—just as I’ll help Arachne. I’ll even put in a good word for you, if you want me to.”

  “Finished,” said Arachne West. “Here’s yours. Can you stall the cops for us?”

  “I expect I can keep them fully occupied for quite a while,” Lisa said as she accepted the proffered wafer and tucked it into her thigh pocket. “Go far. Go fast. Try to let me know how it works out for you.”

  When they had gone, she put the gun down on the desk and moved over to open the door to Morgan’s cell.

  He should have looked relieved when he saw that it was Lisa coming through the door, but he didn’t. He had expected her. He’d had faith in her—but it was too belated to win him any moral credit. In spite of everything they had done together, and everything they had been to one another, he had never had quite enough trust in her discretion, or in her devotion to the only real duty she had ever recognized.

  “You’re a smug, selfish, secretive bastard,” she said as she went to help him up.

  “And you,” he muttered reflexively. All things considered, it seemed preferable to a counteraccusation of contributory negligence.

  EPILOGUE

  When Morgan and Chan had finally finished packing, Lisa went with them to take one last look at the ruins of Mouseworld. The room had been tidied up, as far as was possible, and all the roasted corpses had been removed, but the plastic slag that had once been feeding mechanisms, cleaning systems, ladders, and cage fronts had resolidified into a bizarre work of conceptual art.

  “They’re not actually going to leave it like this, are they?” Lisa asked.

  “Undecided as yet,” Chan told her. “It all depends on Ed Burdillon. I told him that a monument of this kind is worth far more to the department, and to the world, than anything that could be put in its place, but this is supposed to be a research-active department, and there is a war on.”

  “It won’t matter,” Morgan Miller stated loftily. “When the big collapse really begins, in ten or twenty or thirty years, all this will be lost. Not just the appearance, but the meaning too.”

  “A pity, if true,” Chan opined. “The allegory of Mouseworld was never so apt as it was in the manner and aftermath of its destruction. I always said it was a far better symbol of the world’s predicament than you would ever allow, and I was right.”

  Chan was the only one of the three who could have kept his job if he had wanted to. The university authorities still didn’t know about his unauthorized usurpation of the Mouseworld experiment, and probably never would. His only misdemeanor, according to the official record, had been an idiosyncratic but understandable desire to talk to Lisa before he talked to Peter Grimmett Smith. That was little or nothing by comparison with Morgan’s self-confessed forty-year history of unlicensed and unrecorded experiments. If Morgan had bothered to state his case to the Ethics Committee and the university senate, he would have faced several dozen charges of gross misconduct and would have lost on every one of them. Even so, Lisa thought, it would have been very interesting to hear his defense, and it would have been a real education for every undergraduate allowed to listen in.

  She hadn’t had the option of stepping down that quietly, although neither Judith Kenna nor Peter Grimmett Smith had had the slightest interest in putting her in the witness box in an open court. She had been refused permission to resign before facing an internal inquiry, so she had been forced to undergo the ritual humiliation of listing as many of her sins as she cared to admit, expressing repentance and offering profuse thanks for the leniency of her punishment. She had taken the procedure very seriously, as was only to be expected of such a long-serving officer, and she had taken great care to confess to every peccadillo they could actually prove, even condescending to own up to a couple they couldn’t, in the interests of not having them dig too deeply in pursuit of more.

  Surprisingly enough, she had played the game well enough to absolve Mike Grundy from all blame except that attached to his carelessness in managing his computer passwords. For that, he got off with a caution. He could have gone back to work, at least for a year or two—so his resignation, like Chan’s, really had been voluntary. As Lisa had anticipated, he had no difficulty in looking after himself, and he required no help from her or Leland or anyone else in finding a new challenge.

  Judith Kenna had also walked away from the affair without the slightest blot on her reputation. Lisa never heard whether or not Peter Grimmett Smith had been tokenistically censured by the oafs who had thrown him in at the deep end without adequate support, but she hoped that he’d escaped more or less unscathed. Because Morgan Miller declined to give any testimony relevant to the charges of abduction and malicious wounding, the CPS had to drop them, and the specific individuals who had taken part in the raid on Lisa’s flat and the bombing of Mouseworld were never conclusively identified. The only person to serve a jail sentence was Helen Grundy, who had been given three months for vandalism, although she had been released on amnesty after a fortnight. Stella Filisetti had contrived, with the aid of a good lawyer, to obtain release. Lisa assumed that she wo
uld be continuing her promising career as a loose cannon, although she had been refused access to her former equipment. Arachne West had never even been arrested.

  On the whole, though, Lisa couldn’t see that the ending was a particularly happy one. There was no technology of longevity, for women or for men, but there was a nasty weapon that would always be lurking in the background of life, even if it were never actually fired. And no matter how well the measures recommended by the Containment Commission worked, or how cleverly they would be facilitated by the newly resurgent textile industry, Malthus was still right. The world’s overabundant population was still increasing, and the longer that situation persisted, the steeper would be its fall when the bubble eventually burst. Everyone in the world who was blessed or cursed with a fully developed Cassandra Complex was still in the endless tunnel, still unable to glimpse the light, still laboring under the curse of helplessness.

  Lisa couldn’t believe that the biowar defense mechanisms pioneered by the MOD and private enterprise would be completely effective. If she had ever been tempted to believe that, Chan’s explanation of why his own revolutionary antibody packaging had failed would have put her right. It hadn’t failed because it hadn’t worked, but because it had worked too well.

  “If our immune systems could work any better than they do,” he had told her after concluding his deliberately vague technical summary, “natural selection would probably have ensured that they would. The problem posed by viruses of the common cold and of influenza viruses isn’t just a matter of mutation—it’s also a matter of mimicry. The most successful diseases hide their DNA in protein coats that reproduce protein-formations already manifest in the body’s own structures. If the immune system reacts against them too aggressively, it triggers autoimmune responses far more deleterious than the disease effects of the virus—because the most successful diseases are also discreet. Killing one’s host is a very bad survival strategy.