Текст книги "The Cassandra Complex"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

When Chief Inspector Kenneally tried to assure the three of them that he could assuage many of their anxieties concerning the nature of the experiments in which the department’s dogs were involved, they assured him that he could not. When he denied that any dogs kept by the university had ever been infected with brain-damaging antibodies or artificial viruses, they told him they had heard such apologetic lies a hundred times before, and invited him to deny that the pups that had been seen to die in a gas chamber were really dead.

“I can’t do that,” he admitted, “but my colleague Dr. Friemann will be pleased to explain to you exactly what kind of research is being conducted, and what benefits are expected to flow from it for thousands of household pets and working dogs.”

Thanks a lot, Lisa thought as the hostile gazes of the three liberationists swung around to study her face. Eagle’s face was doubly shielded by blond dreadlocks along with face paint that split his features into black and white, but his blue eyes were penetrating. Jude’s warpaint was less flamboyant, and his dark eyes seemed less threatening, but Keeper Pan must have been even paler of complexion than Eagle when she was not in uniform, and the pinpoint pupils in her brilliant turquoise irises seemed particularly sinister.

“Just as her colleague Dr. Goebbels would have been happy to explain exactly how the death of the victims hesent to the gas chambers would benefit the mass of humankind,” Eagle informed the chief inspector from the side of his mouth. “Murderers are never short of excuses.”

“My job is to catch murderers,” Lisa pointed out, figuring that while she was in the spotlight, she might as well try to do the job. “Not to mention rapists, thieves, and animal abusers. I analyse DNA—not just human DNA, but plant and animal DNA. I can tie a suspect to a crime scene by means of the grass stains on his shoes. I can identify the individual nest from which eggs have been looted and the individual tiger whose organs have been ground up to make quack medicines—and I’ve done both those things, for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the World Wildlife Fund. I’m not the enemy. Biologists are not the enemy.”

“Biologists who murder animals in the name of experimentation arethe enemy,” Jude retorted. “They’re the enemy we’re here to fight, the enemy we’re here to stop. Biologists who create whole new species whose sole reason for being is to suffer from horrible diseases are the enemy.Biologists who make new kinds of viruses for use as weapons of war are the enemy.Biologists who play with immunosup-pressants and prions as if they were toys are the enemy.They’re the enemy that has to be defeated if we’re to five like truly humanbeings. They’re the enemy that has to be defeated if we’re to five at all. “

His oratorical technique was good. If he hadn’t been trained, Lisa thought, he’d certainly put in some practice. As far as the people who’d come only to be bystanders were concerned, he was winning hands down.

“The vice-chancellor has agreed to set up an internal inquiry to look into all the allegations made by the person who made the tape,” Kenneally said, obviously figuring that it might be best to bring the discussion down to earth again. “He’s also offered to let you have a seat on the committee as well as to send delegates to give evidence. That’s generous, I think—”

“Generous!” echoed Keeper Pan, her high-pitched voice cutting through the stormy air like an ancient factory whistle. “One place in a ready-made committee! One vote against a ready-made majority! One voice against a chorus! One honest witness against a team of stooges! Inquiry’s just another word for stall.We don’t want an inquiry—we want immediate action and a public guarantee that all animal experiments will be abandoned for good. We want it now”Perhaps, Lisa thought, Jude and Keeper Pan practiced their rabble-rousing techniques after sex, just as she and Morgan Miller had always practiced the art of clinical rhetoric.

Even Kenneally knew that Keeper Pan’s last cry was the cue for a chant, and he tried to get in the way.

“That’s not possible,” he said, raising his voice to make sure everyone could hear him. “That simply isn’t possible.”

“Yes, it is,” Eagle shouted back. “It’s not just possible, it’s easy.All you have to do is let the animals go.”

Haifa million mice!Lisa thought. Well, maybe we should. Give them the half-million mice, and the cats– not to mention the rabbits– and let them carry their prizes away, while smooth-talking them into refraining from killing one another. If only Ed and Morgan had a pride of lions and a flock of lambs! How these fools could educate us then in the art of the possible!

That was when the eggs started to fall on the police line. The “Rioters’ Handbook” on the net advised all demonstrators to start with eggs, because eggs were messy without threatening real injury. The tactic was supposed to put the police at a PR disadvantage, because passing out riot shields in response to half a dozen eggs would always look like over-reaction when the videotapes were studied. Every policeman and newsreader in the land had read the “Rioters’ Handbook,” of course—but that didn’t make the gambit any easier to counter.

Kenneally didn’t hestitate. He signaled for a second line of officers to move in front of the existing line, so that the men with the helmets and shields could be seen to be protecting their defenseless colleagues. As soon as the shields were in place, however, the hail of eggs intensified, smearing the sheets of transparent plastic with an opaque mess. At least one in ten of the eggs was rotten, and the stench of hydrogen sulfide filled the air. The volley was aimed primarily at the helmetless officers, but Lisa and Kenneally were too close to the line to avoid it—and there was no further point in their staying put, given that Eagle, Jude, and Keeper Pan had melted back into the crowd. Lisa didn’t wait for an order before turning on her heel and running back to the command vehicle.

As if her flight were the cue that the demonstrators had been waiting for, a hundred voices took up Keeper Pan’s suggested chant—and the hundred increased as the bystanders began to join in with the fun.

As soon as he was back in the command vehicle, hot on Lisa’s heels, Kenneally ordered up the reserves. He instructed them to move into flanking positions, formed up for a baton charge.

“What kind of gas?” a uniformed inspector demanded.

How nice to have a choice, Lisa thought. Once upon a time, it all had to end in tears, but now we have an entire spectrum of specialist smokes,

“No gas!” Kenneally told him. “They’re just kids, mostly. Let the batons give them pause for thought, then move forward—walking, not running. No head-breaking.”

If only the demonstrators had been working to the same sporting assumptions, all might have been well—but the new kinds of gas were advertised on the net, and the best efforts of His Majesty’s Customs & Excise were inadequate to prevent deliveries to eager customers. The reservists hardly had to to take up their formations when the gas grenades began to break them up again—and when they charged, they charged, raggedly but with violent effect. If they refrained from head-breaking, it was only because their training had taught them well enough the tactics of jab-and-slash. They went for bellies, balls, and kneecaps, and cut down the opposition with far more effect than random blows to hard heads could ever have achieved.

The protesters didn’t panic, but the bystanders did—and somehow, the least-careful bystanders now seemed to be in the front Unes to the right and the left, if not yet in the center.

Lisa and Chan observed the chaos dutifully from the command vehicle, each with a conscientiously clinical eye.

“You were right, Miss,” the security man observed, as if it were cause for surprise.

Lisa knew long before the official announcement came, twenty-four hours later, what the outcome of the riot would be. The university authorities undertook to comply with the spirit as well as the letter of the 2000 Act, banning all current and future experiments on dogs, unconditionally.

The ALF claimed yet another famous victory, and wisely refrained from returning to the fray on behalf of the rats and mice. Eagle and Jude were arrested but released without charge; Keeper Pan was the only real catch among those against whom there was sufficient video evidence to bring charges of assault. Under her birth name, Pamela Hardiston, she was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, but was removed from Warminster Open after seven days on medical grounds. She was credited with five more weeks of theoretical jail time at the Royal United, served under the joint supervision of Group Four and Bristol Cityplex Social Services, before being released on parole.

Lisa had faced at least a hundred perpetrators of serious crimes in various courtrooms before she finally ran up against one, in 2019, who was crazy enough to swear that he would come back and kill her when he was released. She was mildly surprised that it had taken so long, given the extreme reluctance of the vast majority of serious offenders to accept any responsibility for their own deeds. It always seemed to be somebodyelse’s fault, and police scientists in general were no less unpopular among the criminal classes than detectives, but detectives received far more threats of vengeance—though not, of course, as many as innocent bystanders who happened to be eyewitnesses and therefore seemed to be universally regarded as legitimate targets.

The man who broke precedent by threatening Lisa was a serial rapist named Victor Leverer, who appeared utterly convinced of his innocence of any wrongdoing in spite of his frequent use of a knife. He seemed to regard the fact that none of the slashes he inflicted were mortal—even though some of them were far from trivial—as proof of his loving intent, and he offered an impassioned speech in his own defense in which he claimed that the minority of his accusers with whom he had actually had intercourse had been more than willing, and that the only reason they had subsequently turned against him was that they had been pressured by lesbian radfems convinced that all heterosexual intercourse was rape. Lisa, he claimed, was at the core of a radfem conspiracy, and she had fabricated the evidence linking him to those incidents in which he still denied any involvement at all. Strangely enough, there was no detectable pattern to his loudest denials—they were not the most serious assaults, nor the accusations whose evidential support was weakest.

“Don’t worry about it, Lis,” Mike Grundy said after the judge had delayed sentence so that a psychiatric report could be compiled. “He’s just putting on a mad act before he goes to the shrink. It’s only a ploy.”

“The problem with that kind of ploy,” Lisa told him glumly, “is that the people who try it sometimes fall for their own patter. If he pretends hard enough that I’m the Antichrist who stitched him up on behalf of Lesbians Incorporated, he might end up believing it, and even if the shrinks tell the judge to throw the book at him, he’ll be out in seven—ten at the most. That’s plenty long enough for the grievance to fester, but not so long that I needn’t worry about it till I’m old.”

“These things never come to anything,” Mike told her. “Real life’s not like TV and the movies. He’ll have other things on his mind once he’s sent down. He’ll forget all about you inside of a year.”

“Real life is getting more like TV and the movies every day,” she countered with a sigh. “Where else can people find their role models now that the family’s completely broken down and nobody reads books anymore?”

“The family hasn’t broken down,” he assured her. “And people still read. It’s only TV that says otherwise.”

In Mike Grundy’s view, he and Helen still constituted a family of sorts in 2019, even though he’d accepted Helen’s decision not to have children. On the other hand, while Mike and Helen were alike in hardly ever opening a book for other than strictly functional reasons, Lisa was a committed reader.

“Well,” she said philosophically, “I suppose it goes with the territory. I suppose anyone who retires from the force without accumulating a whole football team of ugly monsters who’ve threatened to chop them into little pieces at the first opportunity obviously hasn’t made sufficient impact on the Empire of Evil.”

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 gotsupport.”

“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– alwaysthink 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 wethat your theyexcludes, Chan?” Lisa wanted to know. “Are we the citizen mice, adapted to intolerable circumstances? How do weget 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 isto 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 youhave in mind.”

“You still spend too much time with Miller and the other old witches cackling around their cauldrons at the university,” Mike told her, unaware that he was ironically echoing what Lisa had said to Chan. “You should have cut that umbilical cord long ago. We’re in the real world, and we have to tackle practical problems in a practical way. So do the people we’re trying to control—and in the end, they’ll accept that. They have to.”

“Unfortunately,” Lisa said, “they don’t. That’s why we keep picking up the pieces—and why every year that passes delivers more and more pieces to our doorstep.”

“We still have to keep picking them up,” Mike insisted. “What other choice do we have?”

“None,” she admitted. “But having no choice is no guarantee that we’ll win in the end.”

“You’re beginning to sound like Helen,” Mike told her glumly. “Or she’s beginning to sound like you. She used to be so optimistic, so brave, but now … it’s far worse being a social worker, of course, than being in the force. When we send them up, we chalk up another victory, and every year brings more, but that’s just another beginning as far as Helen’s people are concerned. What’s winning, from her perspective? All she can ever do is to try to hold back time, and in the end, she always loses.”

“She could move on,” Lisa pointed out.

“So could we,” Mike countered. “Even if we’ve both hit our limit promotionally, we could move sideways—but we don’t. We keep plugging on, willing prisoners of routine. Helen’s the same. She’s losing her courage as well as her convictions, but she’s no quitter. Not at work.”

“Citizen mice,” Lisa said quietly.

“What?”

“That’s how the mice adapt—the ones that do. They accept the conditions of adversity. They accept the narrowing of their personal space. They accept the loss of their reproductive drive. They accept that the only thing to do is to stave off disaster and keep staving it off. They accept that there’s no virtue in being a competitive rat when competition only leads to ulceration and cannibalism and insanity.”

“We’re not mice, Lis. We’re people.”

“I know that,” Lisa told him, “but we have the same problems as mice, and some of us find the same solutions, while we look for all the others that we need and can’t quite find.”

“The bloody Cassandra Complex,” Mike observed in disgust. “Sometimes, you know, I could almost wish that you’d joined the Real Women when you had the chance. Arachne West and her chums might have been crazy as well as ugly, but she wasn’t as miserableas Morgan Miller and the comic-book Chinaman. Helen’s still in touch, I think, if you want to change your mind.”

“Citizen mice don’t change their minds,” Lisa told him. “They just keep on going with the flow.”

“Until it ends.”

“Until it ends,” she agreed.