The Cassandra Complex Part 14

In subsequent conversations, of which by far the majority were held in less comfortable arenas, Lisa heard Morgan Miller's prognosis of the current crisis in human affairs at much greater length, and in infinitely finer detail. She listened to his rhapsodic a.n.a.lyses of the possible scope of the imaginary art of algeny. She bore witness to his careful sifting of the aphoristic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. She patiently tolerated his speculative investigations of the strategy and tactics of the biological warfare that would supply the means by which World Wars Three and Four were bound to be fought. She helped him to discover and expand the unique pathology of his peculiar Ca.s.sandra Complex.

Lisa had always thought herself to be the last person in the world to resent the lack of romance in a s.e.xual relationship, but Morgan Miller certainly tested her limits in that regard. From the very beginning, she regarded him as a challenge to-and perhaps the ultimate test of-her own ideals and principles.

In the beginning, at least, she was proud of the way in which she coped with him. She honestly believed she was adapting him to her own purposes while he was adapting her to his. Theirs, she thought, was an honest contract for the pleasurable use of one another's s.e.xual parts, and no sort of marriage at all.

Later, she began to doubt herself, and when that happened, she had perforce to doubt him too, but for a year and more she was convinced that the two of them had the whole art and science of human relationships well and truly licked.

She slept with Chan Kwai Keung too, but only twice. It was not that he was in any real danger of falling deeply in love with her, but the intricacy of his mind would not let him treat their s.e.xual intercourse superficially. It made him more introspective and self-doubtful, and that was not the effect Lisa wanted to have. Morgan Miller was by no means incapable of self-doubt, but it required a far more powerful stimulus to bring it out in him.

She never slept with Edgar Burdillon, although she spent almost as much time with him on a day-by-day basis as she did with Morgan, because he had at least as much to teach her about laboratory technique and biomolecular a.n.a.lysis. She found him more comfortable company than Morgan or Chan, and did not want to prejudice that ease of a.s.sociation by undue complication. No matter how abrasive a mind became, it still required comfortable refuges, and Ed Burdillon became one such refuge, all the more valuable to her because it was part and parcel of her working environment.

If she'd had to guess, in the summer of 2003, Lisa would have correctly estimated that Ed Burdillon would one day be head of the department, and that Morgan Miller would still be working alongside him, but she would have taken it for granted that Chan and she would both move on.

If she had been asked, in the summer of 2003, what it would signify if she and Chan were still around in 2041, she would have judged it evidence of failure, indolence, or cowardice.

If she had been invited, in the summer of 2003, to estimate the year in which the world's population would finally peak and the great collapse would begin, she would probably have said 2040, although she would have hoped secretly that the estimate might be ten or twenty years too early.

Morgan Miller's lectures on the neoMalthusians were fun-maybe the best fun available to Lisa outside of his bed during the winter of 2002-3, which turned out to be the worst of the zero years-and she actually began to relish the prospect of lending him a.s.sistance by supervising the supportive seminars in the following academic year.

Although, Miller, as a confirmed lover of aphorisms, was prepared to borrow telling phrases from the likes of Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin, his actual teaching drew far more heavily on the hard data that had been patiently collated by Claire and W. M. S. Russell in Population Crises and Population Cycles Population Crises and Population Cycles in order to add statistical detail to their accounts of humankind's previous flirtations with extreme population density. Each such flirtation had been facilitated by a great leap forward in agricultural science or technologies of irrigation, and each one had its own idiosyncratic features by courtesy of its specific social context, but the raw numbers always told the same story. Case by case, from China and "monsoon Asia" through the Near East and Europe to Mexico and the Andes, Miller followed the Russells' a.n.a.lyses of the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of the ecological impact of their numbers, bringing all known history and a substantial fraction of prehistory into a single, overarching frame. in order to add statistical detail to their accounts of humankind's previous flirtations with extreme population density. Each such flirtation had been facilitated by a great leap forward in agricultural science or technologies of irrigation, and each one had its own idiosyncratic features by courtesy of its specific social context, but the raw numbers always told the same story. Case by case, from China and "monsoon Asia" through the Near East and Europe to Mexico and the Andes, Miller followed the Russells' a.n.a.lyses of the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of the ecological impact of their numbers, bringing all known history and a substantial fraction of prehistory into a single, overarching frame.

The tide of figures was irresistible, and by the time Miller began to speak to his students about the predicament of the modern world, there was no room left for doubt that the crisis of contemporary civilization was new and unprecedented in only one significant respect: the fact that it was global.

"The numbers are larger than they have ever been before, of course," he said with awesome casualness, "and the technological efforts that have permitted their inflation have been bolder than could ever have been conceived in any earlier era-but the only truly significant difference is that the impending collapse, which we cannot avert, but only postpone, will not be localized. We shall not be making a little desert, or laterizing the soil of a single plain; we shall be laying waste to the entire world. The survivors will hate and despise us for it. We shall seem far worse in their eyes than the conquering hordes of Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan, because we are motivated not by dreams of glory, but by cowardice and willful blindness. They will be right to hate and despise us, because we know what we are doing, and will not refuse to do it. They will know that we had a choice, and that what we chose to do was to destroy the world. Our gift to the children whose presence will bring about that destruction is a poisoned chalice from which billions will drink premature death. How can they help thinking of us as perverse as well as evil? Why should they?"

The seminars supporting the lectures were not, of course, as livery as Morgan Miller hoped. In that respect, at least, he was a poor prophet, misled by residual optimism. The audiences were thin, and most of the students who actually bothered to turn up spent their time meekly waiting to write down what he said, in case they needed to reproduce it in an essay or a final exam.

Lisa rarely bothered to write anything down at all. She had never made any conscious concession to tradition or ritual, and her policy was never to make a note of anything that could be looked up on the net or in a library. Life was too short.

"It might not be as bad as you suppose," she once suggested to Miller, though not in any public arena. "The traditional Malthusian checks are making new progress in their long war of attrition. The poor are starving in ever-greater numbers now that compa.s.sion fatigue has firmly set in, and the war business is booming. Even the bacteria are striking back now that they've developed immunity to so many antibiotics, and global warming is increasing the violence of the weather by leaps and bounds. Maybe the rate of increase will level off at a sustainable level."

"Too little too late," was his gloomy retort. "Medical science is far too efficient to let the bacteria catch up. The war business is far too businesslike. Compa.s.sion fatigue is localized. We have no reason to think that the existing population can be sustained in the long term."

"But you admit that the same advances in biology that underlie medial science will transform the war business," Lisa pointed out. "As the territorial imperative gradually overwhelms us and sends the whole world crazy, we'll surely have the weapons we need not merely to reduce but to manage the population. You and I might be on the side of the angels in terms of what we we do with DNA, but Porton Down is less than fifty miles away." do with DNA, but Porton Down is less than fifty miles away."

"It'll be too little too late," Miller insisted. "In any case, the last people who ought to be in charge of demographic management are generals and politicians. In time, no doubt our children's children might make the kinds of social adjustments that the citizen mice of Mouseworld have made-but like the citizen mice of Mouseworld, they won't be able to do it until they've been through at least one population crash, and maybe more than one. With luck, I'll be a very old man by the time I see my nightmares coming true-but you're twelve years younger than I am. You stand to lose that much more than I do."

"I'll go down fighting," Lisa said flatly.

"I know you will," he replied.

It was the first real compliment he had paid her. Unfortunately, it remained the best for far too long.

If Lisa had been asked, in the summer of 2003, whether she really intended to go down fighting, she would have said "Yes" and said it very firmly-but if anyone had asked her to specify exactly what the fight would entail, she would have been unable to do so.

She knew even then that there was bound to be a fight of some sort, but she could not tell who or what the enemy might be with whom she could actually become engaged.

When she completed her work at the university, she moved to a brand-new lab faculty that was only two miles away, but it was like stepping into a different world.

The rapid advancement of forensic science since the advent of DNA fingerprinting and its importance in supplying evidence for criminal prosecutions had necessitated a radical overhaul of its inst.i.tutional structure. The lab into which Lisa moved was part of a series of experiments attempting to discover by trial and error the ideal relationship between the CID's operations and the evidential a.n.a.lysts. It had been placed in the same building, and every plausible measure had been taken to ensure that scientists and policemen would become parts of a single tight-knit community. The intention was a n.o.ble one, and the hazard proved in the long run not to be a total loss, but for those abruptly thrown in at the deep end and required to make the dream come true, it was a taxing challenge.

The police force was not a happy organization in 2005. For ten years and more, it had been bruised and battered by attempts to root out corruption, inst.i.tutional racism, and inst.i.tutional s.e.xism, and its officers were all too well aware of the fact that one of the most widely publicized effects of the introduction of new methods of scientific a.n.a.lysis had been to expose numerous cases of wrongful conviction in which police evidence had been shown to be manufactured. The siege mentality adopted by the police in response to seemingly never-ending criticism of their att.i.tudes and methods ensured that a large minority among them-perhaps even a majority-saw the arrival in their staff operations of a legion of laboratory workers as an invasion of potential fifth columnists. Everyone recognized the necessity of working together, and everyone recognized that the new partnership was capable of delivering considerable rewards, but the necessity was tinged with bitterness and the rewards seemed, in the beginning, to be the rations of Tantalus.

In spite of her own best intentions, Lisa found that she had to cling hard to the relationships she had formed at the university in order to provide some relief from the constant stress of her new workplace. She continued to seek what solace she could in the arms of Morgan Miller, but exposing her new troubles to the commentary of his abrasive mind made her feel as if she were trapped "between the devil and the deep blue sea." She often found it more restful to see Ed Burdillon or Chan Kwai Keung on a purely platonic basis. Their advice was worthless-Burdillon suggested she immerse herself more fully in her work and focus her attention on the quest for promotion, while Chan wondered whether she might not be a great deal happier if she returned to the groves of academe in order to climb the postdoctoral ladder to tenure-but they were unfailingly sympathetic.

Unfortunately, Lisa was well aware that her continued reliance on old friends was part of her problem rather than any kind of solution. She had to form new relationships within the station, not merely with the laboratory staff alongside whom she had been set to work, but with the officers whose Herculean labors she was supposed to be supporting. She certainly did not want to embark upon any new s.e.xual relationship-within the police force, such liaisons were generally considered to be unhealthily incestuous-but she did need to set up productive and satisfying professional alliances.

It was in this context that her acquaintance with Mike Grundy was forged and tempered.

When she first met him, in 2006, Grundy was a detective constable who had relocated after a sideways move from the uniformed branch. He was hardworking, cheerful, and laid-back. He was not particularly handsome, but he made up for this with a natural charm that made him easy to like. He enjoyed his work enough to be un worried about the necessity of making upward progress through the ranks. Having had no education in science to speak of, he was fascinated by the apparent miracles that the lab workers could perform in regard to fibers and stains, and fascinated by the lab itself, which seemed to him to be a kind of wizard's cave. He loved to be invited to look down a microscope or to inspect some intricate pattern inscribed in gray gel by patient electroph.o.r.esis. And he laughed at Lisa's jokes.

He didn't always understand the jokes, but he laughed at them anyway. He soon became her favorite source of puzzles, and she in her turn became his favorite consultant. Without actually intending to, they began to rely on one another, not merely for constructive a.s.sistance, but for all the kinds of rea.s.suring strokes that made the routines of everyday life more comfortable. They never dated, and rarely saw one another in any kind of one-to-one situation, but whenever they were in a crowd, they gravitated together to form a distinct subunit.

If Mike Grundy was ever jealous of Morgan Miller-or, for that matter, of Chan and Burdillon-he never gave any sign of it. His s.e.xual interest was routinely attracted by women much prettier than Lisa, and any flirtatiousness in their relationship was understood by both parties to be purely superficial. Once their friendship was solid and comprehensively defined, in fact, Mike frequently used Lisa as a useful source of advice on the management of his love life. Once he had grown used to seeing her as an expert, he tended to a.s.sume that her expertise was far less specialized than it was. He had such awesome faith in the linearity of her intelligence that he seemed to expect her to know everything he didn't, or at least to be able to form a more reliable impression than his own. This did not, however, prevent him from disagreeing with her on various issues of personal importance. One of them was marriage.

"You're wrong about there being no point in marrying if you don't intend to have children, Lis," he told her, while using her as a shoulder to cry on the first time he had made an unsuccessful proposal, in 2012 or 2013. "People aren't programmed for the solitary life. They're gregarious, and families-even if they're just couples-are the real units of society, not individuals."

"It's a common argument," she informed him loftily. "The couple as the atom of community-a hydrogen atom, one presumes. But which partner is to become the proton and which the mere orbiting electron? During courtship, it's the men who buzz around the honey pot-but once the ceremony's over, they expect the roles to be reversed, taking it for granted that they'll be the nuclei around which their wives will helplessly circle. I can see why men like the idea-but I think I'd rather be a free radical."

Mike had no idea that the metaphor had become disastrously mixed, although none of her university friends would have allowed her to get away with it. Even Ed Burdillon would probably have begun rhapsodizing about the a.n.a.logies to be drawn between the waywardness of human pa.s.sion and the counterintuitive wonders of quantum mechanics, but Mike Grundy's intellect was cut from coa.r.s.er and more utilitarian cloth.

"That's so so twentieth century," he protested. "In fact, it borders on the Victorian. Modern marriage isn't a matter of domestic slavery. Everybody works nowadays, if they can. Modern marriage is more like a business partnership." twentieth century," he protested. "In fact, it borders on the Victorian. Modern marriage isn't a matter of domestic slavery. Everybody works nowadays, if they can. Modern marriage is more like a business partnership."

Lisa did not like to seem trite, and flatly refused to consider the obvious jokes about sleeping partners, shareholdings, and dividends. "Partnership creates unnecessary obligations," she said instead. "The modern trend is toward freelance consultancy and free-floating labor."

"Not in our Une of work," he pointed out. "The consulting detective was a literary conceit, like the lone scientific genius making monsters in the bas.e.m.e.nt."

"Those are all surprisingly stubborn conceits," Lisa observed, "but not as stubborn as the love story. You don't feel obliged to fit your working life into the mold formed by TV cop shows, so why feel obliged to fit your private life into the mold of the kind of paperback pulp you'd be ashamed to display on your bookshelves?"

"Given the number of crimes of pa.s.sion we have to deal with," he said, "that's ridiculously cynical."

"Given the percentage of crimes of pa.s.sion that fall into the thoroughly modern categories of road rage, phone rage, and store rage, it would be ridiculous to take any other view."

"That's frustration, not pa.s.sion."

"All pa.s.sion is frustration, Mike. s.e.xual frustration is no different, physiologically, from all the other kinds of stress that eat away at the lining of your gut and pile pressure on your clogged-up arteries. The trick is to deal with it without letting the adrenaline run wild. If you can't do that, your natural cheerfulness and charm will leach away by slow degrees, until you turn into a middle-aged grouch-just like all the other senior officers."

It wasn't intended as a prophecy, but it proved all too true. Mike Grundy's cheerfulness and natural charm did indeed diminish with every decade that pa.s.sed and every promotion he gained. The fact that he got stuck at DI didn't save him, any more than impact with her own gla.s.s ceiling saved Lisa from adding the last few twists to her own brand of bitterness. Mike got married too, to his precious Helen of Troy: an unambiguously lovely girl he always considered to be that little bit too good for him.

It was an opinion that the Helen in question inevitably came to share, as Lisa could have prophesied but never did. Where Mike Grundy was concerned, she felt obliged to keep her Ca.s.sandra Complex on a tight rein-and she sometimes wished in later years that she had kept it under even slightly tighter control in her relationship with Morgan Miller.

There were times, during the early phases of Mike's marriage, when Lisa doubted her own judgment of that inst.i.tution, and she was by no means glad when the pa.s.sage of time eventually proved her right.

Although they had more than enough in common, Helen Grundy and Lisa never got on well after the marriage. It would have been an exaggeration to say that Helen ever hated Lisa, but that probably had more to do with a policy decision to consider her too contemptible to be worthy of hatred than any lack of pa.s.sion. In hydrogen-atom terms, Helen had no intention of being switched from a nuclear to an orbital role by any mere ritual. Having given herself in marriage, she expected to become and remain the center of her husband's existence, and she was intolerant of any distraction beyond the demands of duty. From the very beginning, Lisa could see that Helen was far more career-minded than Mike, and that his lack of impetus in that regard would develop into a nasty bone of contention, but she never told Mike. At least, not in so many words. He would not have believed her, and he would have resented the prediction.

He would have resented it even more when it eventually came true, but the fact that Lisa had never actually spelled it out enabled her to remain sympathetic and steadfast when disaster finally struck.

Helen Cornwell, as she was before her marriage, was a hospital social worker at the Royal United, which had recently been combined with the nearby Manor Hospital into one of the country's largest healthcare inst.i.tutions-exactly the kind of inst.i.tution that a burgeoning cityplex needed. Her duties ranged from abortion counseling to surgical aftercare, and she was constantly under pressure to extend herself even further; she worked hours that were just as long and often as unsociable as a detective's, and had found that as injurious to her personal relationships as did any policeman.

Helen first encountered Mike Grundy in the context of a delicate series of child-abuse inquiries, and was initially quite comfortable with his friendship with Lisa. The rapid expansion of genetic counseling at the interface of medicine and social services provided them with a ready-made topic of conversation, although Helen never took aboard Mike's certainty that Lisa was a ready font of infallible information regarding the fallout of the Human Genome Project. As Mike and Helen drew closer together, however, Helen made a concerted effort to draw their atom of community away from all rival attractions.

At first, Lisa had tried to defuse Helen's anxieties, going out of her way to a.s.sure her that she was no threat to their partnership, but her attempts to form as close a friendship with Helen as she had with Mike were always doomed.

Helen was the kind of feminist that Morgan Miller deplored: a die-hard subscriber to the notion that science and technology were ideologically polluted with the worst kind of masculine ambitions. She was overfond of a.n.a.logies representing contemporary ecological crises as the aftermath of a "rape of the Earth" that had begun with the Industrial Revolution. She also took far too much notice of propaganda that saw the entirety of genetic science, and the Human Genome Project in particular, as a "Frankensteinian bid" by the male of the species to usurp essentially female prerogatives of reproduction.

Lisa attempted to undermine these opinions with as much subtlety as she could muster, but she couldn't entirely control the temptation to excoriate them with a Muleresque fervor. She even tried to soften that kind of blow by crediting the most scathing observations to Morgan Miller and delicately refraining from lending them her own wholehearted endors.e.m.e.nt, but the tactic never worked.

"Your problem, Lisa," Helen said to her with treacly concern, on the last occasion when Lisa attempted a full-scale conversion, in 2024 or 2025, "is that you've sold out. You know deep down that that's what you've done, but you can't bear to face it-so you cover it up with all these layers of dismissive arrogance and barbed sarcasm. You'll never be happy until you can be reconciled with your own conscience, and you'll never achieve that unless you can tear down the walls of false consciousness you've erected in your psyche."

"It's kind of you to lend me your expertise when I'm not one of your clients," Lisa replied as mildly as she could, "but I'm happy as I am, and joining the police-for me as well as for Mike-was more a matter of buying in than selling out. We all have to do what we can, in our different but complementary ways, to hold society back from the brink of chaos."

"I've heard you say many a time that nothing can stop us from going over that brink," Helen pointed out sweetly. "Too many children in the world. Masculine science does love its simple explanations, doesn't it?"

"Even if a fall is inevitable," Lisa replied, "it still makes sense to delay it as long as possible. When the collapse begins, good policing will be even more essential than it is today-and science offers the only hope we have of getting the parachute open before the fall becomes a fatal crash."

"The only remedy we'll ever have against disaster is the capacity to treat one another with courtesy and charity," Helen informed her.

There was no point in contradicting Helen's ready a.s.sumption that courtesy and charity were essentially female virtues-or, indeed, in denying most of her other a.s.sumptions. She was not the kind of person to admit that she might be fundamentally mistaken, and for all her feminist philosophizing, she certainly couldn't allow the possibility that a plainer and older woman might have the advantage of her. So Lisa gave up trying to be a friend to Mike and Helen alike, and contented herself with maintaining half a friendship with Mike alone. It was not so great a loss as all that, especially while she still had Morgan Miller, Ed Burdillon, and Chan Kwai Keung. Or so it seemed, until the day when everything everything fell apart. fell apart.

PART FOUR.

The Miller Effect

NINETEEN.

Mike Grundy had pulled the Rover off the road, blocking the driveway of a house on North Road. Lisa left her own car on the roadway, even though traffic was beginning to build up and she was sure to get in the way of vehicles filtering out of Hadley Road into the left-hand lane of North Road. As if suddenly uncertain of his purpose, the detective stopped in his tracks when he saw Chan emerge from the pa.s.senger seat, flattening himself against the fender as horns began to blare.

"It's okay, Mike," Lisa said.

Grundy waited by the Rover while they made their separate ways to stand side by side confronting him. The expression on his face was troubled, but the trouble was a mere mask pasted over a deep-seated exhaustion.

"Sorry, Mike," Lisa said. "I needed to see you. Now I need you to take Chan in for me. Don't expect any brownie points for it. Nothing we do from here on in is going to save either one of us. We're too badly soiled. It's not our fault, but we're finished in the police force."

Mike looked at her curiously, but all he said was: "Nice suit. Where's your belt?"

"I had to put it in for cleaning," she said. "I don't suppose you've had that old wreck swept recently?"

"As a matter of fact," he told her, half turning to look down at the roof of his car, "our n.o.ble leader ordered a check on all vehicles as soon as it was obvious that the station had become leaky. You can never be a hundred-percent certain, of course, but I think I'm clean. If you can say the same, no one is listening in on us."

"Good," she said. "It doesn't make a lot of difference at this stage, but it would be nice to have the moment to ourselves. I've no time to spare so I'll just say what I need to say. Helen's involved in Morgan's kidnapping. She probably thinks she's in charge, but if she ever actually was, her authority must have grown pretty shaky by now."

The disbelief inscribed on Mike's features was a sight to behold, but he didn't contradict her. Instead, he let the thought linger for a moment while he studied Lisa's face for signs of insanity. He was shaking his head slightly, but it was as much confusion as denial. In the end, all he said was: "What makes you so sure?"

"It first occurred to me when Stella Filisetti referred to you as my 'second-string boyfriend.' There's no way she could have got that from Morgan, or from university gossip-and Judith Kenna certainly didn't tell her. It explained how the kidnappers got the pa.s.swords that blacked out our end of the 'plex, and how the intruders got through my locks so easily, but I wasn't absolutely sure until Smith told me about the contact search he ran on Stella and the Real Woman. If the threads leading to all three of the leading names had been planted, it would have been a meaningless joke. Two of the spoilers had to have been added to prevent the third name from standing out like a sore thumb-and I'm reasonably certain that the chief inspector didn't do it. I'll lay odds that you didn't change your pa.s.swords to the police systems after the split, and that you wrote down the pa.s.s codes to the locks at my flat somewhere that someone who knew your habits very well could easily find."

Mike considered the catalogue of clues for a moment or so, n.o.bly refraining from making any comment on the circ.u.mstantiality of the evidence.

"Okay," he said finally. "Why?"

"Stella found something, maybe in Mouseworld and maybe in one of Morgan's computers. Whichever one it was, it made her check the other, and she found confirmation. She put those two together with a further two from Morgan's trips to Ahasuerus and the Inst.i.tute of Algeny, and made far more than five. She'd probably confided her suspicions to her radfem friends already, but the fact that Morgan was talking to Goldfarb and Geyer spooked them sufficiently to take action. They may have a handful of hobbyist terrorists along-that's probably where they got the weapons, the accelerant they used in Mouseworld, and the idiotic posing-but they're not really an organized gang. Even if they've managed to get Arachne West on the team, as seems probable, they're still the rankest kind of amateurs. Unfortunately, that doesn't make them any less dangerous. When the computer team clears out all the disinformation, Smith and Kenna will move a whole task force against the couriers carrying Stella's stolen mice, but I figure that I have at least a couple of hours to try to get Morgan out quietly before the s.h.i.t hits the fan. That's what I'm going to do, while you ferry Chan to the Renaissance."

"You didn't answer the question," Grundy pointed out quietly. "What could Filisetti have found that turned a woman like Helen into a master criminal?"

"I don't know for sure," Lisa confessed, "but my guess is that what she thinks she found is evidence that Morgan discovered a means of extending mammalian life spans that works only on females. She thinks he's been sitting on it for up to forty years, trying to figure out a way of making it work on males too. She thinks that because he had failed to do that, he was planning to hand it over to some organization that would carry on the work while maintaining the same kind of secrecy. When she confided all this to her radfem friends, they presumably ran the same background checks on Ahasuerus and the Algenists that Peter Smith ran, and came across all the same tabloid legends. Both inst.i.tutions are rumored to have exotic secret agendas-but who isn't nowadays? Ahasuerus is said to have been set up specifically to find a means of conferring emortality upon its ill.u.s.trious male founder, Adam Zimmerman, and the Algenists are misunderstood by their severest critics to be trying to create a n.a.z.iesque master race. You can see how that sort of bad press might raise radfem hackles."

"I can easily imagine Helen getting excited about that kind of thing," Mike admitted wryly. "In fact, I don't have to imagine it. Imagining her as a criminal mastermind dispatching gangs of a.s.sa.s.sins and bombers is a different matter, though."

"They think I'm in on it," Lisa added, shivering in a sudden gust of cold wind. "They think I've known all about it since day one, but that I've kept quiet. Stella and Helen have convinced themselves that I've been prepared to go along with Morgan's plans in return for a promise that I'd eventually be paid off with the treatment, thus betraying the sacred principles of sisterhood. That's why they sprayed Traitor' on my door and tried to shake me up by telling me that Morgan never really intended to cut me in. Can I go now?"

Grundy was still dubious. "I'm no fan of Helen's nowadays," he said, "but this is way beyond her. She might conceivably be involved, but she can't possibly be the one behind it."

"She's more than involved, Mike," Lisa told him, hoping she'd read that part of the puzzle right. "This whole thing's been too personal personal That's partly down to Stella, but only partly." That's partly down to Stella, but only partly."

"That doesn't make sense either," he objected. "We live in crazy times, but-"

"It's not just the crazy times," Lisa told him, determined to put her point across quickly so she could move on. "The sense of impending doom that Containment and the undeclared war have cultivated undoubtedly helped to shove them over the edge, but they're taking it very very personally. Stella Filisetti doesn't know Morgan the way I do, and I doubt if she can relate to his way of life the way I could. She feels let down because he didn't change into Mister Right the moment he started s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her. She's magnified that sense of betrayal into something much greater. And Helen doesn't know personally. Stella Filisetti doesn't know Morgan the way I do, and I doubt if she can relate to his way of life the way I could. She feels let down because he didn't change into Mister Right the moment he started s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her. She's magnified that sense of betrayal into something much greater. And Helen doesn't know me me the way you do. She didn't understand what happened after she threw you out, any more than she ever understood that we really were the way you do. She didn't understand what happened after she threw you out, any more than she ever understood that we really were friends. friends. She was all set up to believe the very worst of me. They've inflated their personal frustrations into a much grander paranoia-a conviction that something immensely valuable is being withheld from them by people they know. They think they're being left to die while less worthy acquaintances are plotting to survive the impending catastrophe and come through it with a secure position in the pockets of the rulers of the new world. h.e.l.l, even Peter Grimmett Smith of the MOD is a sucker for tales of the Secret Masters and the Ice Age Elite. The only difference is that he's either too shrewd or too contemptuous to believe that someone like me could ever be a part of that kind of conspiracy. Stella isn't. Nor, alas, is Helen." She was all set up to believe the very worst of me. They've inflated their personal frustrations into a much grander paranoia-a conviction that something immensely valuable is being withheld from them by people they know. They think they're being left to die while less worthy acquaintances are plotting to survive the impending catastrophe and come through it with a secure position in the pockets of the rulers of the new world. h.e.l.l, even Peter Grimmett Smith of the MOD is a sucker for tales of the Secret Masters and the Ice Age Elite. The only difference is that he's either too shrewd or too contemptuous to believe that someone like me could ever be a part of that kind of conspiracy. Stella isn't. Nor, alas, is Helen."

"If you say so," Grundy conceded reluctantly. "But even if you're right, it ought to be me who goes after Helen, not you."

"It has to be me, Mike," Lisa told him. "It's because I know Morgan better than anyone else does that I know know this farce is founded on a colossal mistake. I'm the only one who can convince the radfems of that fact. Morgan obviously couldn't." this farce is founded on a colossal mistake. I'm the only one who can convince the radfems of that fact. Morgan obviously couldn't."

"Maybe no one can," he suggested.

"Maybe not-but I don't have time to argue, Mike. I have to go now."

Chan had already moved to Mike's side. He was waiting, with a meekness so exaggerated that it was almost insulting, for further orders. Mike looked sideways at him, as if reading a message from his slumped shoulders and sleepless eyes. "I suppose you have considered the possibility that they might be right, Lis?" he said finally.

That one was too important to leave unanswered, but all Lisa said was "Yes."

Of course she'd considered the possibility that Stella really had found what she thought she had-but she'd rejected it. If Morgan Miller had discovered a life-extension treatment whose only deficiency was that it worked only on women, he wouldn't have kept it entirely to himself. Even Helen Grundy and Stella Filisetti didn't think that badly of him. They thought badly enough of Lisa to believe she'd conspired with him to keep it quiet, but they hadn't been able to suppose that Morgan would simply let her grow old and die with all the rest. Even they accepted that if Morgan Miller had drawn up a list of his own personal Ice Age Elite, she would be on it.

There had to be something else: something that Stella Filisetti had missed; some obstacle that Morgan had stumbled over, that had carried on bruising his shins for forty years.

Lisa wanted to tell Mike that she was deeply sorry he had been caught up in it, and sorry that his ex-wife's meddling would surely torpedo his attempts to cling to the vestiges of his career. She wanted to commiserate with him because her own career had been similarly blighted. She wanted to tell him, in the most heartfelt manner she could contrive, that it might all be for the best, because they should never have allowed themselves to sink so deeply into the ruts that had somehow consumed their lives. She wanted to try to convince him that they had been good citizen mice for far too long, putting up no resistance to the shrinkage of their personal s.p.a.ce, refusing to get excited about the stultification of their options. She wanted to ask him whether it was really all bad to be a Calhounian rat, raging against the injustice of circ.u.mstance. She wanted to a.s.sure him that everything might still work out for the best, not merely for themselves, but for the world.

But she had no time.

Even if it had all been true, she had no time.