Текст книги "The Cassandra Complex"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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SIXTEEN

There was a uniformed policeman waiting for them at the helipad. As soon as Smith descended from the craft, the man handed him a plastic bag, which he immediately passed on to Lisa.

“Change in the helicopter,” he commanded. “Put your belt and wristwatch in with the old clothes.” Lisa hesitated, wondering whether to raise an objection, but Smith was right. If Leland had planted anything, it was as likely to be in her belt or watch as in Jeff ’s shirt and trousers. If she had to be phoneless for a while, she had to be phoneless. She moved back to the second rank of seats so that she’d be shielded by the first, although she felt slightly shamed by her obsolete modesty.

It wasn’t the first time she had ever put on one of the new garments, but she had found the previous tentative trial so uncomfortable that she had decided to stick with her “dead clothes” for a while longer. Now she wondered why she had reacted so negatively. Was she as much of a dinosaur as Peter Grimmett Smith? Of course not. She was a scientist, supposedly immune to the reflexive “yuck factor” that governed initial reactions to so many new biotechnologies. In a sense, her own response had had an opposite cause; she had always thought of the new fabrics in terms of “fashion,” because that was the lexicon the advertisers had used in order to push it, and she had always resisted the idea of being a slave to fashion, valuing newness for its own sake. Now, if the suspicions raised by Smith’s clumsy inquiries could be trusted, the advertising lexicon was about to undergo an abrupt change.

What Arachne West had told Lisa on the occasion of their first meeting didn’t seem quite as paranoid now as it had then. Now it was perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain that the new global culture was a plague culture, and that smart clothing would soon have to be seen in terms of personal defense—not antibody packaging in the traditional sense, but in a significant new sense. Soon enough the first questions anyone would ask salespeople about the clothes on their racks would concern the quality of their built-in immune systems and the rapidity with which they could react to any dangerous invasion of the commensal bodies within their loving embrace.

The garment Lisa was struggling into wasn’t uncomfortable in the sense that ill-fitting clothes could be—although the way it hugged her flesh so cloyingly was slightly disconcerting—but it was worn without underwear and followed the contours of her body so carefully that she felt unusually exposed.She hesitated before dropping her belt into the plastic bag along with the clothes she had discarded, eventually retrieving her personal smartcards and tucking them into one of the pockets of her new suit. The smartcards ought to be clean, she reasoned, and it was one thing to be phoneless, another to be keyless and creditless.

Ginny reentered the copter just as Lisa finally let the belt drop in the bag. There was a conspiratorial gleam in the younger woman’s eye. She extended a gloved hand over the back of the front passenger seat, opening the palm to display two small white tablets. Lisa met her gaze suspiciously.

“It’s going to be a long night, Dr. Friemann,” Ginny said. “You need to stay alert.” Her free hand also came into view, clutching a plastic bottle filled with turbid fluid. “Fortified GM fruit juice,” she explained. “Calories, vitamins, ions … everything you could possibly need. The boss told me to give it to you.” Plainly, the boss hadn’t mentioned the side order of pep pills.

If only, Lisa thought as the comment about everything she could possibly need echoed in her skull—but she accepted the pills into her right hand and took the bottle in her left. She swallowed the pills and washed them down thoroughly.

“Keep it,” Ginny said. “Drink the rest on the way.”

Lisa nodded and followed the pilot out of the helicopter. She handed the plastic bag to the policeman who’d met them. “Better have them swept,” she said. “Tell the lab to be careful not to damage the goods—if the equipment is state of the art, it’ll probably come in handy. Send the proceeds back to the East Central Police Station.”

The officer nodded.

“The next generation of suitskins will probably have sweepers built in,” Ginny observed as she slammed the helicopter door. “The police will have to adopt smartfiber uniforms then.”

Lisa hadn’t heard the term “suitskin” before. She’d only heard smartfiber ensembles called “smartsuits.” She had to admit, though, that the one-piece she was now wearing did feel rather like a second skin. As the fibers of such garments accumulated more faculties, their quasisymbiotic relationship with the body’s own outer layer would become increasingly intimate as well as increasingly complex. The suits currently used to hook up to virtual-reality apparatus were much bulkier, restricted in their use to dedicated spaces, but the gap between organic and inorganic microtechnology was closing all the time.

Sometime within the next fifty years, it would be possible to talk of nanotechnology as having arrived rather than merely anticipated, and the bridges between the organic and the inorganic would be multitudinous. Even the best suitskins imaginable would be external technology, though: overcoats for ordinary people. Even gut-based nanotech would be external in a technical rather than in a topological sense. One day, if Algenists and other champions of evolution toward the superhuman got their way, none of it would be necessary. True overpeople presumably wouldn’t need overcoats to protect them, not from the elements or from all the hostile viruses that bio-armorers could devise.

“That’s better,” Smith said as she joined him in the elevator that would take them down to ground level. Lisa had already noted that however smart the fibers of her new suit might be, it was perfectly staid in cut and color. It hugged her figure tightly on the inside, but on the outside, it was shaped like a conventional jacket and trousers, and she didn’t suppose that its almost-black color would look significantly brighter in daylight than it did beneath the soft yellow lights of the elevator cab.

A patrol car was waiting for them. The driver switched his blue flashers on before setting forth into the traffic, but it didn’t accelerate their progress to any noticeable degree. The city streets were surprisingly busy, and the drivers of the other vehicles evidently didn’t feel under any obligation to get out of the way. Their onboard computers would be storing up instances of “contributory negligence” with the usual alacrity, but nobody seemed to care anymore. The improvements in road safety wrought by the ’38 Road Traffic Act had proved as temporary as the achievements of all its predecessors.

Lisa finished off the dregs of the drink Ginny had given her. It had taken the edge off her appetite, but the pills hadn’t kicked in yet and she was still engaged in a constant struggle to remain fully alert.

Unlike the Ahasuerus Foundation, the Institute of Algeny had not leased office space in an ultramodern building. Its governors had gone to the opposite extreme, buying a house in an upmarket residential area—which still looked like the private houses that surrounded it. The fact that its walls and gates were topped by razor wire didn’t seem at all unusual, given the similar levels of paranoia manifest by its neighbors. The tree-lined street in which it was located was obviously home to people who valued their privacy and took the business of property protection very seriously indeed.

After being admitted to the house, Smith and Lisa were ushered into a room that could have passed for an ordinary suburban living room had it been equipped with a homestation, although the mock-antique furniture was the kind usually advertised on the shopping channels alongside discreetly cabineted, twentieth-century TV sets. It wasn’t until they were seated that their host introduced himself.

“Matthias Geyer,” he said. “Delighted to meet you, Dr. Friemann. There are Friemanns in my family—perhaps we might be distantly related.” His accent was smooth and melodious, but quite distinct and deliberate.

“I doubt it,” Lisa said.

“But the ancestor who bequeathed the name to you never bothered to Anglicize it,” Geyer pointed out. Lisa wondered whether he was trying to recruit her as a potential ally, or making a point for Peter Grimmett Smith’s benefit.

“No,” she admitted. “He never did.”

Matthias Geyer was taller and slimmer than Dr. Goldfarb, but he wasn’t as tall or as angular as Peter Grimmett Smith. He was better looking and seemed considerably younger than either of them, although Lisa thought she detected signs of cosmetic somatic engineering on his cheeks and neck. If so, he was probably a forty-year-old determined to preserve the appearance of his twenty-five-year-old peak rather than a thirty-year-old devoted to clean living. He offered his guests a drink, and when they declined, he suggested that they might like something to eat, given that they must have missed dinner. When they declined that offer too, he bowed politely in recognition of their sense of urgency.

“I’m very sorry to hear that misfortune has visited Professor Miller,” he said, now addressing himself—with what must have been calculated belatedness—to Peter Grimmett Smith. “I will, of course, do anything I can to assist his safe recovery. I would be devastated to think that his contact with our organization had anything to do with his disappearance.”

“But you do recognize the possibility?” Smith said swiftly.

“I fear so. What he told me was inexplicit, but he was clearly attempting to use an element of mystery to engage my interest. I could not say that he was dangling temptation before me, but he did go to some length to hint that when he spoke of negative results and blind alleys, he was not telling the whole story.”

“And that’s what you reported back to Leipzig, is it?” Smith asked.

“I am not required to report back to anyone,” Geyer informed them loftily. “I make my own decisions. Ours is not a centralized organization, like the Ahasuerus Foundation. Nor has it any principal base in Germany. We have come a long way from our roots, Mr. Smith—in every way.”

Lisa wondered whether Geyer knew what they had been talking about in the helicopter. Even if there had been no other bug but Leland’s, it was possible that Leland was working for, or with, Geyer—but Geyer’s defensiveness was natural enough. He must have known that Smith would have made a comprehensive background check on his organization, and what it would have revealed.

“What was it that Miller was trying to sell you?” Smith asked, unwilling for the moment to be sidetracked into a discussion of the Institute’s shady origins.

“He made it perfectly clear that he was not trying to sellme anything,” Geyer corrected him. “He wanted to make a gift, of results accumulated over four decades, concerning a series of experiments he had conducted on mice and other animals.”

“What other animals?” Lisa was quick to put in. Nobody else had mentipned other animals, and it was a long time since Miller had been involved with the creation of transgenic rabbits and sheep.

“Dogs, I believe,” Geyer replied.

“Dogs?” Lisa echoed skeptically. “The university hasn’t used dogs as experimental animals since the 2010 riot.”

“What kindof experiments?” Smith asked, impatient with what seemed to him to be an irrelevant digression.

“Professor Miller was calculatedly vague,” Geyer said apologetically. “He was insistent, however, that the work had a direct bearing on our core endeavors. He expressed concern that if our researchers did not know what he had tried to do and failed, they might waste years of effort following the same sterile path. It had once seemed such a promising line of research, he said, but had disappointed him grievously—and by virtue of its time-consuming nature, he could no longer carry it forward himself.”

“Time-consuming nature?” Smith queried.

Geyer raised his hands helplessly. “Given that he also contacted the Ahasuerus Foundation,” he said, “I could hardly help drawing the inference that he was speaking of a technology that would permit the extension of life, but he did not say so in so many words.”

“But that isone of your so-called core concerns, isn’t it?” Smith’s suspicion that Geyer was being evasive was painfully obvious.

“One of them,” Geyer readily conceded. “The founder of the Ahasuerus Foundation was rather narrowly interested in the possibility of human longevity, apparently assuming that human nature could be changed in that single respect without unduly affecting its other components. We have always taken the view that a more general transformation is desirable, of which longevity would not necessarily be the most important aspect.”

“You’re more interested in breeding a master race than in simply helping everyone to live longer,” Smith said, not bothering to employ the kind of inflection that would have turned it into a rhetorical question.

Geyer’s expression hardly changed, but Lisa put that down to stern self-control in the face of naked offensiveness. The pills were taking effect now, and she felt a certain tautness and tone returning to the muscles of her limbs and face. She hoped that the dose wouldn’t prove too great. She needed to have her wits about her; it wouldn’t do any good to be wide awake but too wired to maintain a proper balance.

“If you’ll forgive me saying so, Mr. Smith,” Geyer said smoothly, “that’s the kind of observation one never hears anymore outside of England. Here, as in Germany, there is hardly anyone now alive who first learned to understand the world while Adolf Hitler was still in power. In four years’ time, a whole century will have elapsed since the end of World War Two. It’s time to put away the old insults, don’t you think? The purpose of the Institute of Algeny is to fund research in biotechnology that will assist the cause of human evolution.”

“Point taken,” Smith said easily. “I take it that you’d rather I was equally careful to avoid the use of such terms as übermensch?”

“Yes, I would,” Geyer said equably.

“Even though your own publicity material describes algeny as a Nietzschean discipline and Thus Sprach Zarathustraas one of its inspirational documents?”

“Even so,” Geyer conceded with the ghost of a smile.

“Not that you have anything to hide, of course,” Smith persisted.

“Nothing at all,” Geyer said. “I am merely trying to save time. Our aims are widely misunderstood, and clearing up misconceptions can be a vexatious business. It is true that a few of our intellectual antecedents harbored some very strange hopes, but in the days when there was no technology available to carry forward their aims, they had little alternative but to place optimism above practicality. Now that technology has replaced superstition, we have shed the delusions of the past. Professor Miller did not seem to be confused or dismayed by the kind of slanders that have occasionally been leveled against our organization, and I find it difficult to believe they are relevant to your inquiry—unless you believe that mere contact with us might have been enough to inspire his kidnapping by political extremists.” Geyer seemed to find that possibility amusing, implying by his attitude that the suggestion was absurd.

“I believe that’s possible,” Smith said doggedly. “Has your Institute ever had any links with a movement whose members call themselves Real Women?”

“No,” Geyer said, still manifesting slight but rather contemptuous amusement.

“But you’ve heard of them?”

“Yes. We have nothing against what they refer to, rather oxy-moronically, as natural physical culture. I suppose they might have regarded our endeavors as a kind of unnatural physical culture, but I’m not aware that they ever singled us out for particular criticism.”

“You’re using the past tense,” Smith pointed out.

“My impression is that the feminist movement no longer has any meaningful existence, as a movement,” Geyer said. “If I’m mistaken, I apologize. Is this really relevant?”

“It is if Morgan Miller has been kidnapped by Real Women,” Smith answered sourly.

Geyer turned to look at Lisa again. “You must have discussed Nietzsche with Morgan Miller, Dr. Friemann,” he said. “Perhaps you could advise your colleague that he is taking the wrong inference from his citation in our charter.”

“I’m not so sure that he is,” Lisa replied. She felt strangely calm now that the effect of the pills was no longer manifest as a disturbance. “I haven’t read your charter myself, and I never had the privilege of hearing Morgan’s views on Vril—or, for that matter, on your particular brand of algeny. If it was a recent enthusiasm of his, he’s more likely to have discussed it with Stella Filisetti, his current research assistant. Did he mention her contribution to his experiments, by any chance?”

“I don’t believe so,” Geyer said. “He gave me to understand that he had begun this work before or shortly after the turn of the century. If so, he’d have been far more likely to credit you as a contributor, don’t you think?”

“Did he?” Lisa inquired. She could feel a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, and wondered how long it had been since she had last smiled.

“I fear not,” Geyer admitted. “He implied that it was a sideline to the research on which his early reputation was based—an unexpected spin-off. Perhaps he was reluctant to discuss it with his colleagues until he’d made more tangible progress.”

“You just told us that he’d hinted to you that he hadmade more tangible progress,” Lisa pointed out.

“Perhaps there came a time, quite recently, when he reviewed his results and began to wonder whether they were as disappointing as they had seemed at the time,” Geyer suggested.

“We need detail, Herr Geyer,” Lisa said. “We need to know precisely how this hypothetical research was supposed to make a contribution to the cause of human evolution. If it wasn’t a failed life-extension technology, what was it?”

“I wish I knew,” Geyer said, exuding sincerity with practiced ease. “The puzzle becomes more intriguing with every hour that passes. He did not tell me. But if I were to answer as an Algenist rather than as a mere witness, I would point out that one cannot alter one aspect of human nature without altering others. A man who did not age, and who might live forever if he did not die violently, would differ from you and me in many subtle ways, Dr. Friemann, and perhaps in some not so subtle. Ancient romances of the elixir of life could sidestep such questions, but serious scientists cannot. If someone came to you with a supposed elixir of life, Dr. Frie-mann, you would be bound to ask the awkward questions, would you not? How, exactly, does it work? What, exactly, are its side effects? There are unintended consequences in everything we do, are there not?

“If Morgan Miller had told me in so many words that what he wanted to give me was a technology that would allow people to live longer, those are the questions I would have asked him—but he did not tell me what he had discovered, or why it had not lived up to his expectations, or why his attempts to overcome the problem had come to nothing. If the people who have abducted him had not asked those questions beforehand, they have acted precipitously, perhaps at the risk of bitter disappointment. If they had asked them but had jumped to the wrong conclusions, the depth of their disappointment will be all the greater. Do you see what I mean?”

It was impossible to be certain, of course, but Lisa thought she could see at least part of his meaning. If Matthias Geyer had reached the same tentative hypothesis that she had, he’d had more time to think about its implications, with fewer distractions. Smith’s reference to Real Women hadn’t seemed to come as any surprise to him, which reinforced Lisa’s suspicion that Leland and the Institute of Algeny were hand in glove—but while Leland had seized upon the apocalyptic aspects of the Real Woman’s speech, Geyer might have taken the same view as Lisa as to its actual import.

However clever Geyer might be, though, he didn’t know everything that Lisa knew. He had no way of matching her guess as to the identity of the person behind the kidnapping. All he could do was to sit around and wonder why Morgan had thought his quest a partialfailure—which would surely have driven him to the same hastily formed conclusion that Ms. X must have reached: that if Morgan had discovered a method of life extension that worked only on women, he would have immediately gone to work to find a way of making it work on men too. But surely, Lisa thought, neither Matthias Geyer nor Ms. X knew Morgan Miller as well as she did—unless, of course, she was a mere fool where Morgan Miller was concerned, and always had been.

“No,” she said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Geyer flashed her a ghostly half smile that might have been a calculated reflection of her own. “Perhaps I’m not entirely sure what I mean myself,” he said. “Algeny encourages the use of the imagination—the everlasting intellectual struggle to transcend the mental limitations imposed on us by the idols of the theatre and the tribe. I deeply regret what has happened. I feel sure that Morgan Miller was an Algenist at heart, and I wish he had come to us forty years ago for assistance with whatever line of research it was that frustrated him so deeply. If you ever come to feel that your vocation in forensic science has run its course, Dr. Friemann, I hope you will consider the possibility of seeking employment with us. We need people of your caliber.”

Lisa remembered Leland’s assurance that he could fix her up with a job. She had thought at the time that he was merely trying to suggest that her decision to overstep the legal line wouldn’t cost her too dearly, but now she considered the possibility that the Algenists really were enthusiastic to recruit her because of what she might know about Morgan Miller’s stubbornly secret research. She had to control an impulse to laugh at Geyer’s temerity. Peter Smith’s expression of disapproval was a sight to behold.

“If you’ll forgive me, Herr Geyer,” the tight-lipped man from the MOD put in, “I must insist that we stick to the point at issue. Do you have a tape of your interview with Morgan Miller?”

“I’m afraid not,” the Algenist replied. “It’s not our policy to tape confidential conversations. I really am trying to be helpful, although I apologize for digressing so far as to tell Dr. Friemann that we value expertise like hers. You have my word that if there is anything I can do to facilitate Morgan Miller’s safe release, I shall certainly do it—but for the time being, I cannot see anything I can more usefully do than urge you to return forthwith to more profitable lines of inquiry. I have told you all I can.”

No sooner had Geyer finished speaking than Peter Smith’s phone rang. It seemed an uncanny echo of what had happened at the Ahasuerus Foundation. “Yes,” Smith said, putting the phone to his ear.

Whatever was said didn’t seem to lighten his mood. His spirits had already become fractious, but the call seemed to darken them even further. When he put the phone away again, all he said was: “Very well, Herr Geyer—we’ll leave it there for the time being.”

Lisa rose with an alacrity she could not have contrived an hour before, no matter how impatient she had become. Smith obviously didn’t want to say anything in front of Geyer that could be construed as an indiscretion, so she didn’t ask any questions. It was, however, left to her to thank Matthias Geyer for his assistance. Unlike Smith, she thought that he probably had been as helpful as he could, in his own way.

When they were back in the police car, with the gates of the Institute firmly closed behind them, she asked Smith what had happened.

“They’ve identified the Real Woman,” he said. “Cross-connecting her records with Filisetti’s revealed what seemed to be a promising network of mutual contacts, but the moment your people got to work on it, they found that it was hopelessly confused by a smoke screen. Someone’s been busy corrupting the files, and the corruption extends into the heart of the police net.”

“Oh,” said Lisa. She had not anticipated this, but now that the information had been laid before her, she could see that it was not in the least astonishing. “What kind of smoke screen?”

“The statistical sort threw out a substantial list of names,” Smith told her glumly, “but the top three, at least, appear to be somebody’s idea of a joke. Guess whose name is number one, even though she didn’t even recognize the woman in question?”

“Mine,” said Lisa, her heart sinking slightly as she realized that this might look a lot worse than Stella Filisetti or one of her confidantes spraying the word TRAITOR on her door. Even so, she couldn’t help adding: “And I bet I can guess who numbers two and three are too.”

“Go on,” Smith invited, trying hard to pretend that it wouldn’t make him any more suspicious than he already was if she happened to guess right.

She went ahead anyway. “Chief Inspector Judith Kenna,” she said, “and Mrs. Helen Grundy.”

“Spot-on,” Smith confirmed. “I suppose I ought to be grateful that they had no way of knowing I’d be sent down from London, or they’d have put my wife’s name in as well.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced of that.

“What about Arachne West?” Lisa asked.

“She was on the list too,” Smith confirmed. “Farther down, of course—but near enough to the top to assist the theory that her name’s one of those that the smoke screen is trying to conceal, not part of the smoke screen itself. It’s only a matter of hours, of course, before the disinformation is eliminated. By dawn, or shortly thereafter, we’ll know for sure who our enemies are and be able to begin tracking down their current whereabouts. Once we can start making arrests, we’ll be able to ascertain Morgan Miller’s whereabouts soon enough.”

Lisa considered telling Smith that she already knew who Smith’s so-called enemies were, and that she already had a plan for ascertaining Morgan Miller’s whereabouts, but she decided against it. Until she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she didn’t want to be one of those so-called enemies, she had to work alone—or almost alone. There was one person to whom she still felt a limited sense of obligation, although it wasn’t going to be easy to give him fair warning without compromising her temporary advantage in the game of hide-and-seek.

“I need some sleep,” she said. “If I’m to be of any use to you when the disinformation is eliminated, I have to get my head down.”

“So do I,” he said. “We’ll go straight back to the hotel—but as soon as the sun comes up, we’ll have to move on.”

By daybreak, Lisa thought, I’ll have moved already– and with luck, you won’t catch up with me until I have all the answers I need.