The Cassandra Complex (30 page)

“I see,” she said. “Knockout mice are perfect models of genetic-deficiency diseases, but the efficacy of antibody-packaging systems can only be assessed in the context of a whole population—ideally, a population under stress. And there you were, spending hours every day in a room whose four walls showed stable populations under stress, all of them running smoothly in the same ancient groove. So you decided to convert two of them into experimental populations by introducing your own transformed mice to see how they would get on.”

“Only one,” Chan said. “I wanted to split the replicates two and two, but Morgan insisted that my intervention should be minimal. I introduced the transformed mice into Paris. Technically, it was a criminal act in that it bypassed the university’s Ethics Committee as well as the Departmental Committee, but I thought it criminal in a higher sense that the Mouseworld experiment had been allowed to stagnate. I insisted that you be kept out of it, Lisa, because I knew you could not countenance any such argument in your professional capacity, but I hope you can see that my conviction was deep and sincere.”

“Cut the crap and tell me what happened to the fucking mice,” Lisa instructed him brutally. Bradford Road was giving way to North Road and her rendezvous with Mike was only a few hundred yards away. Her onboard computer still had not registered a single offense.

“They died,” Chan said in a hurt tone. “They could not survive among the citizen mice. The reason, I believe—”

She hadn’t time to listen to speculation. The fact was all that mattered. “So the experiment failed? It was a complete bust—and
please
don’t feed me that crap about there being no failed experiments in science.”

“It was a failure,” he admitted. “It did not seem significant at the time, when Morgan and I were trying so many different things, but—”

“But when Ed Burdillon roped you into testing
his
new antibody-packaging system, you couldn’t help wondering whether it would run into exactly the same problem. So you—and I do mean
you
, in the narrow sense—were thrown into paroxysms of doubt as to whether you ought to confess to your ancient crime, on the off chance that it might save the Containment Commission from pinning all its hopes on a nonstarter. Except, of course, you couldn’t quite figure out who to confess it
to
—and when the lunatics who snatched Morgan also took the trouble to torch the evidence of your ancient crime, you
really
got your knickers in a twist. And that, to cut a long guilt trip short, is when you finally thought of me.” The junction of North End Road and Ralph Allen’s Drive was visible now, and she could see Mike Grundy’s car, parked and waiting.

“I thought you would know what to do,” Chan said lamely. “I did not.”

“For a certified genius,” Lisa said angrily, “you truly are completely fucking stupid. I really used to look up to you, you know?” She was extremely annoyed with herself, because she knew this was a bad time to be fighting back tears of frustration and disappointment. It didn’t make her feel any better to know that neither Peter Grimmett Smith nor Mike Grundy would have had the faintest idea of what she was on the verge of crying about. The only person who could possibly have understood was Morgan.

“Yes,” Chan admitted miserably. “I know.”

“I wish I had time to figure out exactly what the hell you’re talking about, and whether it matters,” she said as she brought the car to a lurching halt at the junction, “but I don’t. I have to spring Morgan, and I only have a couple of hours to do it in. So I’m going to hand you over to Mike, and he’ll take you to Peter Grimmett Smith. You tell Smith
everything
, except maybe where you saw me last. You can give him my apologies for not being there to translate your explanations for him, and for not being there period. But tell him it really is for the best that I do this now and do it alone. Tell him I’ll be in touch as soon as I can, and that if I haven’t returned by nightfall with Morgan in tow, we’re probably both dead.”

“Do you mean that?” Chan asked anxiously.

“Yes, I do,” she said, although she really wasn’t sure, given that her internal Weather was crazy lemming through and through and that she couldn’t really be sure of anything anymore. “And although it won’t be
all
your fault, you certainly won’t have helped. Now
come on”

Third Interlude

HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

By the time she’d been at her new university for a fortnight, Lisa had figured out why Morgan Miller didn’t wear a lab coat. It was, as she’d instantly suspected, far more than any mere absentminded omission or some petty desire to stand out from the crowd by refusing to accept its uniform.

In Morgan Miller’s view, Lisa eventually deduced, wearing a lab coat implied that being a scientist was a kind of job: something that one put on and took off according to a circadian rhythm of work and leisure. He refused to give tacit license to any such implication. It also suggested that the clothes worn underneath it were more precious than the coat itself, requiring protection from the vicissitudes of laboratory life. Morgan Miller regarded clothes in an icily utilitarian light; he bought his outfits as cheaply as possible, and was not above shopping at market stalls and charity shops. If one of his shirts or a pair of flannel trousers were stained by a laboratory accident, he simply threw them away. He never wore a jacket. Nor did he ever wear T-shirts or jeans, even though it would not have been a violation of his utilitarian principles, because he considered such garments to be key components of the image projected by uncommitted students.

In the course of the first few weeks of their acquaintance, Lisa became as fascinated by her new supervisor as she ever had been by any male of the species. She never deigned to consider the hypothesis that the fascination in question might be classifiable as “love,” because she did not consider herself to be the kind of person who might be vulnerable to the horrible indignities of falling or being in love, but that only made its intensity more fascinating. After her own admittedly peculiar fashion, Lisa was as committed a utilitarian as Morgan Miller, and she viewed the fascination that Miller exercised upon her in a conscientiously cold light, as something that would assist her learning.

Lisa’s friends and relatives had, of course, always assured her that she was merely a slow developer, and that she would begin to believe in love as soon as the feeling first took hold of her, but she had never taken platitudinous advice seriously and her response to her supervisor could not change her mind. She had always retorted, in the face of such obviously misconceived advice, that “love” was merely a species of psychological dependence, cultivated as much by anxiety as hormonal flux. She had no intention of becoming dependent on Morgan Miller, who was probably not a dependable person in any other respect than the purely professional.

Her observations to date had suggested to her that other women fell in love purely because they cared too much about what men thought of them, suffering adrenaline rushes whenever they thought they were being ignored or insulted: rushes that were not chemically different from those they felt when they became the focus of attention or received a compliment, but which they interpreted very differently when sensation became thought. Lisa cared only about what Morgan Miller thought about her ability as a scientist, and she construed his occasional compliments and insults as mere witticisms of no personal consequence.

He obviously liked that in her, but it was equally obvious that he was far too wise a man to fall in love, especially with a putative soul-mate.

Love, in the opinions to which Lisa held firm at the age of twenty-two and Morgan Miller at the age of thirty-four, was merely a matter of self-conditioning and of learned helplessness. Neither of them wanted anything to do with it.

Sex, of course, was a different matter—so different that they wasted little time in courtship before leaping into bed together.

Morgan Miller explained to Lisa, in dribs and drabs, that he had made an irrevocable decision never to get married. This was not so much because he considered his vocation essentially monkish—although he did have a distinct ascetic streak—but because he could see no virtue or purpose in the institution of marriage other than to provide protective cover for children. He was the kind of man who felt obliged to practice what he preached, and it would have been a flagrant violation of his neoMalthusian credo to bring more children into a world that was heading for a population crisis, so there was no earthly need for him to get married. To do so, even if he made his intentions clear to his intended spouse, would have constituted a misrepresentation of sorts. Even a long-term monogamous relationship without benefit of ceremony would have been a compromise reeking of bad faith. He had, of course, taken the precaution of obtaining a vasectomy, by courtesy of the local Marie S topes Clinic, but that had not been sufficient to clarify his peculiar conscience, so he explained to Lisa with all due alacrity that he did not intend to enter into a long-term relationship with her, and would terminate their arrangement if ever it seemed likely to become habitual.

Lisa, at twenty-two, could not imagine that she would continue to see Morgan Miller once she had obtained her doctorate and committed herself completely to some newly hatched state-of-the-art police laboratory, so she had not thought the assertion worth exploring, let alone challenging. She was, however, prepared to tease him about the firmness of his resolution not to maintain the presence of his own precious genes within the great human pool.

“You don’t believe in positive eugenics, I take it,” she felt free to observe after they had consummated their purely utilitarian relationship for the third time, nineteen days after their first meeting. He was the proud possessor of an exceedingly capacious bed whose cast-iron frame and carved head- and footboards must have dated from the Edwardian era, when presumably it had been designed to accommodate a whole family. It was pleasantly situated near the neatly net-curtained southwest bay windows of an equally venerable detached house on the gentler slope of Beacon Hill. It was the ideal venue for idle conversation in the late afternoons of autumn, and Lisa was already looking forward to the sultry evenings of summer.

“I don’t believe in taking genetic determinism to absurd lengths,” Miller told her in response to her question. “I’m an undistinguished specimen, physically speaking, and the quality of my mind has far more to do with my education than any genes I might have inherited from two parents, one an accountant, the other a primary-school teacher. I have, of course, deposited an abundant sample of my semen in a convenient gene bank, in case the world should ever feel that it needs more of my kind, but I am content to leave that decision to those who come after me. It is entirely possible that I shall accomplish far more by winning converts to the cause of algeny than by spreading fertile semen far and wide.”

“What’s algeny?” Lisa asked, as he had clearly intended her to do.

“The true scientific successor to alchemy. Chemistry never had the same objectives, and the fact that inorganic chemistry evolved so much faster than the chemistry of life distorted subsequent opinions as to the nature of the alchemical enterprise. Algeny is the science-based art of practical evolution: the constructive use of our newfound genetic wisdom. I am trying hard to popularize the term, as are a few other enlightened souls, but we have made little progress as yet.”

Such pillow talk as Lisa had been involved in before meeting Morgan Miller had tended to the monosyllabic, and she definitely preferred the new kind, even while recognizing the absurdity of its contrived pomposity.

“So you won’t be volunteering for the first experiments in human cloning?” she prompted, electing to stick to her own agenda rather than feed him the cues that would allow him to ride his own hobbyhorse comfortably into the neatly framed sunset.

“I shall not,” he confirmed, accepting her drift for the moment. “Edgar Burdillon might, but Edgar has ambition, as you’ve doubtless noticed. If he thought it might further his career … but in all likelihood, he lacks the necessary narcissism. I’m no admirer of conspiracy theories, but I strongly suspect that long before Roslin’s favorite sheep was unveiled to the world five years ago, there was more than one rich narcissist in America who had already commissioned his employees to carry forward the task of duplicating him with all possible expedition. There’s no fool like a vain fool, and American fools are currently the vainest of the vain. Not that I have anything against Americans per se, of course—the USA produces the world’s best-educated and most highly accomplished scientists, even if it has to import most of the raw material from the Far East. Its native stock has, alas, been temporarily ruined by feminism.”

“I don’t see how,” Lisa retorted—a little acidly, because she considered herself a feminist and could not abide the contemporary fashion that led so many women of her generation to refuse the label.

“Not intentionally, of course,” he said, smiling as if the tenor of her response had scored him a point in some mysterious game. “Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that it is the reaction
against
feminism that has secured the unfortunate and unintended consequences. The fact that more and more American women have become scientists during the last thirty years would not have been problematic had they simply been absorbed into the prevailing culture of science, but the growing resentment against them felt by their male colleagues and the consequent closure of ranks has resulted in the emergence of a distinct cultural divide. In England, which is nowadays among the last nations to be overwhelmed by the tide of cultural progress, we still speak of the two cultures as a way of contrasting science and the absurdly misnamed humanities, but the only genuine culture is scientific and technological, and the only meaningful cultural divisions are those that develop within science.”