The Cassandra Complex (28 page)

“That’s what Herr Geyer seems to think,” Lisa was quick to say, conscious that it would benefit her to be a little more diplomatic. “He seemed to assume that you hadn’t quite understood the relationship between algeny and Nietzschean morality. He probably thinks your interpretation of the term
übermensch
is a little on the vulgar side.”

“So educate me,” Smith said acidly. “What does
he
think it means?”

“Nietzsche’s idea of the overman was rather vague,” Lisa told him, “but he would certainly have been horrified by the subsequent usurpation of the idea by the Nazis. Nietzsche seems to have thought of overmen—and he did mean
men
in the narrow sense, although I hope that modern Algenists are more generous—as intellectuals and creative artists, definitely not swaggering oafs in jackboots. Nietzsche’s critique of moral systems is complicated, but one of its fundamental observations is that the old moral systems tend to see good in negative terms, as the absence of manifest evils like hunger, pain, injury, and death. That was perfectly reasonable in societies so primitive that they were perpetually assailed by all the ills that made even human life nasty, brutish, and short—but it no longer makes much sense in advanced societies that have the means to oppose the elementary evils and drastically reduce their role in everyday life.

“Nietzsche thought, and Morgan Miller agreed with him, that there comes a point in social and personal evolution at which one has to stop thinking of good merely as the absence of manifest evil—the so-called ‘ethics of the herd’—and begin thinking of good in positive, active, and creative terms. It’s a fundamental tenet of algenist philosophy that instead of merely trying to insulate ourselves from suffering, we have to start thinking about what we actually want to
make
of ourselves. We have to stop being content to be merely human and decide exactly what kinds of superhumans we intend to become. Nietzsche would have agreed with Morgan that the two most obviously mistaken models are political tyrants and plutocrats—and I think Herr Geyer would like us to believe that his Institute of Algeny takes the same view.”

“Does it?” Smith wanted to know.

“You’re the one who commissioned the background check.”

The MOD man curled his lip skeptically. “What about the other stuff?” he asked. “That crack about the elixir of life not being as simple as fantasists made out. He seemed to be trying to make a point.”

“He was,” Lisa admitted, and hesitated only briefly over the question of how honest she ought to be in explaining her interpretation of the point in question. “As far as I could judge, he was suggesting that finding ways to live longer would be futile if we continued trying to live in the same old way. That’s why he was rather contemptuous about Ahasuerus. If Adam Zimmerman really has had himself frozen down until his Foundation can find a way to make him emortal, Herr Geyer might concede that the man’s an enterprising and ingenious coward, but would nevertheless find his cowardice deplorable. I daresay that he said much the same to Morgan in the course of the conversation he was too scrupulous to tape—and he seems to think that he struck a chord. Herr Geyer presumably wants to believe there’s more to Morgan’s imperfect discovery than the possibility of extending the life span—but that might be wishful thinking on his part. He might have been misled by his optimism into mistaking the actual import of Morgan’s reservations.”

Smith thought about that for a moment or two. “You mean that if Miller has discovered a way of extending the human life span, it may have some unfortunate side effect that renders it less than wholly desirable. Like the Struldbruggs in Swift.”

Lisa was mildly surprised by the literary reference, but all she said was “Yes.” She had gone as far as she was willing to go—but it was far enough. She looked out the window again, but there was still no sign of first light.
How can dawn be dragging its feet
, she wondered,
when time is racing at such a headlong pace? Have I somehow cut myself adrift from order and continuity?

“I think what Dr. Friemann means, sir,” Ginny put in, her voice only slightly muffled by the loose-set mouthpiece of her helmet, “is that it might work only on females. That would explain the radfem motivation.”

Lisa didn’t know whether to curse the pilot silently or congratulate her audibly, but she settled for saying: “It’s a possibility—but even if that’s so, it might be far more complicated. That’s why Geyer was so keen to stress that you can’t change one aspect of human life without changing others, sometimes unpredictably. But we can’t forget that this is about what Morgan’s kidnappers
think
he’s got, not what he actually
has
got. There might be a world of difference. I may be foolishly naive, but I cannot believe, even for an instant, that Morgan could have made a discovery of this magnitude without telling me—or, indeed, anyone else.”

“But we don’t know that he didn’t tell anyone else,” Ginny pointed out, carried away by the flood of her own ingenuity. “Dr. Chan obviously knows
something
—and it seems to be something he’s reluctant to confide in us before he’s explained it to you.”

Not just a pretty face
, Lisa thought.
But if you’re right, Ginny darling, and Morgan really does have a technology of longevity whose only downside is that it doesn’t work on people with balls, whose side will you be on come the time when the fat lady sings?
Aloud, she said: “I still don’t believe it. Chan wouldn’t keep something like that from me anymore than Morgan would. We go back a long way.”

“As friends,” Smith reminded her.

“As friends,” she echoed. The words obviously meant more to her than they did to Peter Grimmett Smith—but the real question was how much they meant to Chan.
Where the hell is Chan?
she wondered.
And what kind of stupid game is he playing?
The sky was brightening again, but it was only the lights of the cityplex looming up in the west, far more perverse than any natural sunrise.

“This is all rather fanciful,” Smith complained. The tone of his voice suggested that he didn’t think much of Ginny’s hypothesis, and not because of Lisa’s lukewarm endorsement. Ginny was, after all, only his driver—and Lisa was a woman on the wrong side of middle age. He didn’t have the same imaginative reach as the flirtatious Matthias Geyer did, and nothing like the same imaginative reach as Stella Filisetti and Arachne West. Perhaps that was a virtue, given that Stella Filisetti’s imagination seemed to have carried her away to ludicrous extremes, and allowed her to persuade at least, half a dozen otherwise sensible individuals that her runaway paranoia
might
be justified. Could she have been so effective if the world hadn’t been trembling on the brink of plague war? Maybe not. But the world
was
on that edge, and the knowledge that the men who controlled global commerce—and it probably
was
men, in the narrow sense—had a solution ready for the marketplace wasn’t as much of a comfort to Lisa as it might have been to Peter Grimmett Smith.

“We’ll find out the whys and wherefores soon enough,” Lisa told him, trying hard to sound as if they weren’t important enough to warrant much expenditure of intellectual effort. “What we need to do is make sure that we’re ready to act when your people have sorted out the good data from the bad. We need some sleep. I do, at any rate.”

She saw Ginny’s helmeted head turn halfway, as if the pilot intended to favor her with a long, hard stare—but the gesture was never completed. Ginny’s eyes went back to her instrument panel, and her lips remained sealed.

“Imagine how I feel,” Peter Grimmett Smith complained, evidently of the opinion that he’d had the harder day. “You’re right, of course—we all need to get our heads down for a while. I was right to insist on seeing the Algenist tonight, though—and however crude and vulgar my understanding of Nietzsche may be, I don’t think they’re the kind of people who ought to be entrusted with whatever Morgan Miller has discovered … if he’s discovered anything at all.”

“They probably think the same about the Ministry of Defence,” Lisa couldn’t help observing.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” Smith asked impatiently.

“Merely that
our
primary interest is national security,” Lisa replied, knowing that it would be wise to reemphasize the fact that she was still on Smith’s team. “That’s our sworn duty, and Geyer has to respect it—but he undoubtedly imagines that he’s serving a higher cause, not merely because it’s global rather than parochial, but because it’s progressive rather than conservative.”

“Pie in the sky,” was Smith’s immediate retort. “If he thinks we can simply forget about the old evils and move on, he’s sadly mistaken. Hyperflu is coming fast, and worse things loom in its wake. Our first priority—and for the time being, our
only
priority—is to protect as many of our own people as we can from the murderous kind of chaos that’s already taking hold in the poorer parts of the world. Unless Morgan Miller’s hypothetical discovery bears on
that
problem, we’re all wasting our time here.”

Again Ginny’s head jerked, as if she were going to look around—this time, presumably, at her boss rather than at Lisa—but she thought better of it, perhaps because she was already being guided into her final approach.

“That may well be true,” Lisa said, her voice firm, although its volume was hardly above a murmur. “In the context of the war effort, this is probably no more than a domestic dispute flared up in consequence of an absurd mistake. I can’t see that it’s likely to have any defense implications at all. Even if Morgan’s problematic discovery has anything to do with antibody packaging—and I doubt very much that it does—it won’t allow you to stop hyperflu at the far end of the Channel tunnel. If it could, he’d have been knocking on your door instead of the Algenists’, and he wouldn’t have waited so long before doing it.”

It was impossible to tell whether Smith was prepared to take her at her word, but Lisa was past caring. In his position, she would have reserved judgment, and she assumed that he would do exactly that—but she didn’t give a damn. With or without the aid of Judith Kenna’s computer crime division, his spooks ought to be able to penetrate the smoke screen laid down to delay the identification of Miller’s kidnappers within a few hours, and then they’d still have to track down the culprits. If there was anything to be recovered that might assist the defense of the realm, they’d doubtless recover it in their own good time—but Lisa had her own far more urgent agenda to follow.

“I don’t like all this talk of a New Order,” Smith said reflectively. “Talk of a New Order always implies that the existing order needs to be swept away. It’s a fine line that separates the mere conviction that it’s bound to happen from the desire to help it along—and what you’ve told me about what Geyer might
really
have meant doesn’t make me any less anxious about his organization.”

“The line may seem fine to you,” Lisa said irritably, “but it’s firm enough to Morgan Miller, and to every other sufferer from the Cassandra Complex. Knowing that something is certain doesn’t anesthetize the knower from an acute consciousness of its tragic dimension. I can’t speak for Geyer, or for the Real Women, but the kind of interest Morgan had in the kind of global society that might emerge in the wake of the population crisis didn’t make him enthusiastic about hurrying the crisis along. He would have moved heaven and earth, if he could, to delay the day when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would increase their pace to a gallop. I’ve no reason to think Geyer wouldn’t do the same. He’d probably argue that we were more vulnerable to moral criticism because we’re servants of the Crown rather than champions of the entire human race. Even Leland took time out to give me a little lecture on the virtues of one worldism.”

“Just because our primary duty is to defend the Realm, it doesn’t mean we want to see the rest of the world go to hell,” Smith told her a little petulantly. “If we could stop hyperflu everywhere, we would. We didn’t start this war, and we’re not interested in saving just our own people—but charity begins at home.”

“It’s not me you have to convince,” Lisa told him soothingly. “You don’t even have to convince Herr Geyer if you don’t want to. But he isn’t dangerous just because he doesn’t see things the way you do. Nor are the great majority of the Millenarians, or groups like the Real Women. They’re no more likely to spawn mad bombers and random shooters than the rest of the population—maybe less, to the extent that their ideologies provide some sort of safety valve. I’ve caught a lot of murderers in my time, and although the ones I’ve encountered are a skewed sample, because all the people with real motives can usually be identified and arrested without requiring my kind of voodoo, they’re mostly loners unable to conceive of any escape from their own tortured predicaments. Conspiracies like the one that formed to snatch Morgan Miller are rare exceptions—and I can’t believe they’re enemies of the state, no matter what kind of rhetoric they employ. If Stella Filisetti knew Morgan as well as I do, she’d never have set this snowball rolling.”

“But you’d have to think that, wouldn’t you?” Smith observed, employing all the delicacy and sensitivity he’d displayed when he had blithely suggested to Herr Geyer that the Institute of Algeny was a neoNazi organization. “If only to save your own self-respect.”

“Yes,” she admitted, to herself as well as to him. “Maybe I would, even if I were wrong. But I’m not wrong. I do know Morgan Miller better than anyone else does, and I know that if he had what Stella Filisetti thinks he has, he wouldn’t have buried it and he wouldn’t be trying to dispose of it under the table to Ahausuerus or the Algenists.”

“I can’t assume that,” Smith told her flatly, “and as a member of the police force, neither can you.”

“I know,” Lisa conceded reluctantly.

The helicopter was settling gently into the space reserved for it in the university’s parking area. It was only a few hundred meters from there to the Renaissance Hotel, where Smith’s car was waiting. It wouldn’t matter much whether it was still harboring a bug or two, Lisa thought; there weren’t any more questions that Peter Grimmett Smith could profitably ask, and even he was tired of asking unprofitable ones. The conversation lapsed as the copter settled onto the tarmac and the three of them made their way to the other vehicle.