The Cassandra Complex (21 page)

Oddly enough, it was the fallout from the Leverer case that first brought Lisa into contact with the Real Women, whose movement was still visible and fairly buoyant. She had often seen members of the clique working out in the gym she had been using for the last seven months, and had taken note of the fact that they were becoming gradually more numerous, but it wasn’t until Leverer’s threats hit the headlines that any of them tried to recruit her, or even to test out her credentials as a fellow traveler.

Two of them approached her one evening as she came out of the showers after finishing her routine.

“Lisa Friemann?” said the taller of the two—a dark-eyed woman who had taken the trouble not merely to shave but to permanently depilate her head. “I’m Arachne West. This is Delia Vertue.” Arachne West’s shorter companion, whose still-abundant hair was flagrantly dyed a peculiar shade of blue-black, nodded. “We read about what happened in court.”

“It happens,” Lisa said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Maybe not,” the bald woman said, “but it reflects on us all when people begin spouting that kind of hate. There are too many willing ears about. You five alone, don’t you?”

Lisa blinked. “What makes you think so?” she asked warily. She was trying to edge away and terminate the conversation, but the two Real Women followed her into the dressing room.

“We haven’t been digging,” Arachne West assured her. “No reason why it should be a secret, is there? We can give you some numbers, if you like. Support, in case of trouble.” She held up a small card, but Lisa could see only one phone number on it.

“I’m a police officer,” Lisa said disbelievingly.
“We got
support.”

“Yeah—but sometimes there’s support, and then there’s support. We have policewomen in the movement, and they don’t always seem to feel that their male colleagues are as supportive as they might be. Things do change, but they change slowly, and appearance doesn’t always match reality.”

“I’m fine,” Lisa assured them. “Really.”

They should have gone away then, but they didn’t. “You really should get rid of those dead clothes,” Delia Vertue observed. “It makes good sense to keep up with the technology—for the sake of safety, not of fashion.”

“What do you mean?” Lisa asked, taken somewhat aback by the woman’s presumption.

“We Uve in a plague culture,” Arachne West informed her. “You can steer clear of pricks, but steering clear of STDs is harder. Soon everyone will need a whole second skin.”

“But not yet,” Lisa pointed out.

“Soon,” the bald woman repeated with perfect confidence. “Health is our most precious possession, and it gets even more precious as you get older. Keeping fit is only part of the answer. If you’d like to come to a meeting, we’d be very glad to see you. If you want to talk in private, that’s okay too. Call me.”

Lisa accepted the makeshift card but she didn’t call. The sin of omission didn’t offend Arachne West sufficiently to make her stop greeting Lisa when she saw her in the gym, often taking time out to exchange a few friendly words, but the Real Women didn’t press their case any harder than that. They never offered to supply her with any body-building advice, but they presumably figured that a genetic analyst probably had access to any legitimate somatic modifiers she might need or desire.

In the course of the next couple of years, Lisa’s chats with Arachne West grew gradually longer. Although she always thought of the Real Woman’s theories and ideals as slightly crazy, she couldn’t help but find them intriguing and mildly amusing.

“You might think that we protest a little too much,” the strong-woman told her, “but that’s because you haven’t realized the depth of feeling that’s wrapped up in the continuing backlash. Feminist analyses of the mechanics of male domination didn’t just serve to educate women. They also educated men in the sly art of holding on to their most cherished privileges while making slow concessions in other areas. The iron fist wears a velvet glove nowadays, but it’s still an iron fist. When it comes to the crunch, it’s all about power, and men aren’t going to let it go easily. This is one cold war that won’t end in collapse and surrender.”

“Oddly enough,” Lisa told her, “I know a man who says much the same thing.”

“Don’t be beguiled by that kind of tactical honesty. It’s a gambit. Never underestimate male hatred of womankind, or the lengths men will go to in serving that hatred. Know your enemy—and fear your friend.”

“I value my male friends too much to fear them,” Lisa said dismissively, “and I’m not entirely convinced that you have sufficient experience of the male of the species to qualify you to tell me to discount my own.”

One of Arachne West’s better points was that she was capable of laughing at barbs of that kind. “You’re a treasure, Lisa,” she said. “I bet your friends think so too. I hope you’ll never be disappointed. But you really should get rid of those old clothes. Think smart, lady—
always
think smart.”

“You might be eager to acquire a second skin,” Lisa replied, “but I’m not. Too claustrophobic.”

“It’s a claustrophobic world,” the Real Woman reminded her. “Crowds are germ Utopia, and the whole world is one big crowd struggling to get through the aisles of the Megacorp Mall. Smart insulation is the only thing that can keep you safe in the conflicts to come.”

“Claustrophobia isn’t just a matter of crowding,” Lisa said, quoting Morgan Miller. “It’s also a matter of continuity. Nobody panics in a crowded elevator while it’s moving, but when it stops …”

“Not relevant,” Arachne informed her loftily. “All continuities come to their end. When crowd fever finally comes your way, little Lisa, you’ll need those smart fibers for a shield—all the more so if you haven’t got us to back you up. Invest now, and keep on investing. It’s the only way.”

In time, though, Arachne West seemed to give up on Lisa, and as the Real Woman movement waned, her attendance at the gym dropped off. Lisa didn’t miss her much, because she figured that she’d already heard all her best Unes, but she did recognize the loss as one more stage in a developing pattern of isolation. Some of the things Arachne had said about her existential inertia continued to rankle, and when Victor Leverer’s release date rolled around, she paused more than once to wonder whether the backup she had on call was really the best available.

Fortunately, Leverer never came looking for her. The next woman he attacked was a mere slip of a thing, not yet out of her teens, but she was also a member of the ALF and she had studied the “Self-Defense Handbook” as carefully as the “Rioters’ Handbook.” She cut his hamstrings and his Achilles tendons with his own knife and he didn’t walk again until the NHS got to the very bottom of the waiting list for new-generation prosthetics.

Lisa never had any confrontational dealings with apocalyptic cultists or hobbyist terrorists. She was occasionally called upon to sift through the debris of an explosion in search of complex organic material, but she never turned up any evidence that was crucial to a prosecution. No amateur biological weapons—or, for that matter, amateur chemical weapons—were deployed in the vicinity of the Bristol cityplex while she was stationed there. She was co-opted to assist with the investigation of the London Underground incident of 2019 and the Eurostar incident of 2026, but her part in each operation was minor and she was not required to appear at either trial. For her, therefore, what the tabloids called “the creeping chaos” remained part of life’s background. It seemed ever-present on the TV news and in newspaper headlines, but it never became personal. It was a mere phenomenon, and as such, could be discussed in a perfectly dispassionate manner with everyone she knew.

TV researchers and tabloid reporters sometimes visited Mouseworld in search of a hook on which to hang their latest story, but they received no encouragement from any of the staff. Chan Kwai Keung would not repeat in their presence the kinds of argument that he was still, on occasion, prepared to lay before Lisa.

“Of course the world continues to mirror Mouseworld,” Chan told her in the aftermath of the Eurostar incident. “How could it be otherwise? The cities continue to mock us by setting an example that is by no means good but is nevertheless measurably better than our own. The H Block continues to pile up its tangled record of failed experiments, obsolete stratagems, and forgotten secrets. Morgan’s incessant declarations about the redundancy of the entire operation ring more true with every year that passes—and the same emotional sickness resonates in the hearts of millions of people. It is as ludicrous an oversimplification to group all the tiny explosions of wrath together as symptoms of stress disease as it is to regard them as facets of a mysterious chaos emanating from the depths of Hell. The violent effects may be depressingly similar, but the motive forces are much more various than anyone will allow.”

“Failed experiments, obsolete stratagems, and forgotten secrets?” Lisa echoed.

“Precisely,” he said. “How else can the majority of people see themselves nowadays? How else can they explain their unhappiness, their loneliness, their futility? Accelerating progress robs them of expertise and wisdom more rapidly than education can equip them, leaving them intellectually and imaginatively stranded from the moment they reach adulthood, castaways whose plight can only deteriorate. How can they help hating a world that treats them with such casual abandon? How can they bottle up their frustration indefinitely, when they can see only too clearly that there is no possibility of rescue or relief?”

“Who are the
we
that your
they
excludes, Chan?” Lisa wanted to know. “Are we the citizen mice, adapted to intolerable circumstances? How do
we
get by without going postal?”

“I wish I could say with greater certainty that we are,” Chan said dolefully. “But I fear that only habit makes me speak in terms of they rather than an all-inclusive we. Even you and I would surely be reckoned failed experiments or obsolete stratagems were we viewed by a coldly objective eye.”

“You and I never view one another, or anyone else, with any other kind of eye,” she answered dryly. “And no, I wouldn’t call either one of us a failure, or judge our skills as obsolete. We do good work, and we do it well. We may not be close to defeating the forces of chaos as yet, but we’re certainly doing our bit to hold them back.”

“You don’t believe that,” Chan told her bleakly. “It’s the mask you must maintain at work, and it may well suit you to leave it in place even when you leave, but you know in your heart of hearts that the world is going from bad to worse and that our contribution to its decay is a mere matter of ritual. I used to believe that I could make a difference, not by virtue of any unique ability of my own, but as part of the great bio technological crusade. I recognize now that the best that crusade can hope for is to assist in the rebuilding of civilization after the collapse.”

“I don’t believe you believe that,” Lisa retorted. “You’ve spent too much of your life in one place, working alongside the likes of Morgan Miller. If you’re going to wallow in the same pathological Cassandra Complex, you’d better school yourself to take the same perverse delight in prophecies of doom as he does. You can’t convince me that you’re as crazy or malevolent as the people I labor to put away. You’re one of the sanest men I know, and one of most morally upstanding. You’re not one of them, and never will be. Modesty is one thing, but drastic underestimation is another. And the fact remains—if the world
is
to be saved, biotechnology is the means that will save it. The crusade has to go on. Even Morgan says so.”

After conversations of that nature, it was always good to return to the company of innocents like Mike Grundy, whose underlying faith in the cause had never been dented, even though the wellspring of his old cheerfulness had gradually dried up.

“We’re victims of our own success,” he said on the day the Eurostar plague leaders were found guilty and sentenced to life. “The prisons are overflowing because we’ve become so bloody good at catching the evildoers. The advancement of your kind of forensics and the rapid spread of invisible eyes and ears has made it extremely difficult to plan any kind of successful premeditated crime and almost impossible to get way with any unpremeditated act of violence. At the moment, the situation seems absurd, because people haven’t yet managed to adjust their behavior to take account of the certainty of getting caught, but that’s temporary. As soon as everybody gets it into his head that he can’t get away with it anymore, the incidence of criminal behavior is bound to fall—and once the trend starts, it’ll go all the way. If we can just hang in there, we can usher in a whole new moral order.”

Lisa had no difficulty in playing devil’s advocate to pessimism and optimism alike. “We’re victims of our own success, all right,” she said. “With the aid of mouse models, oral vaccines, and gene therapy, we’ve wiped out all the premature killers except the ones cooked up in labs to steer around the defenses. We’ve never been healthier, never so long-lived, never so crowded, never so
old.
But gray power isn’t really wisdom, is it? It’s inertia. The rights of the aged mostly translate into the right to be stuck in one’s ways, to rail against anything and everything new, to see everything as a threat. I could get nostalgic for the days when most of the people we put away were young, because it was at least possible to hope that they might change—but your new moral order will have to be built from the bottom up, and the demographic structure of today’s world is way too top-heavy.”

“It isn’t the old who are committing the crimes,” Mike said. “The average age of offenders may be rising steadily, but that’s because it started out so low.”

“No, it isn’t the old who are committing the crimes,” Lisa agreed, “but it’s the old, by and large, who are provoking them—and, increasingly, striking back. When they begin to figure that it might be a good idea to get their retaliation in first, the shit really will hit the fan, and all the invisible eyes and ears in the world won’t inhibit them. The Eurostar plague merchants weren’t just amateurs, they were idiots. When somebody decides to do the job properly, we’ll certainly see the beginning of a new moral order—but not the kind
you
have in mind.”