The Cassandra Complex

Tor Books by Brian Stableford

Inherit the Earth

Architects of Emortality

The Fountains of Youth

The Cassandra Complex

The Cassandra

Complex

BRIAN STABLEFORD

A Tom Doherty Associates Book • New York

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THE CASSANDRA COMPLEX

Copyright © 2001 by Brian Stableford

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty

Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stableford, Brian M.

The Cassandra complex / Brian Stableford.—1st ed.

        p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

    ISBN: 978-0-312-87773-6

    ISBN: 0-312-87773-0

1. Twenty-first century—Fiction. 2. Forensic scientists—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Biotechnology—Fiction. I. Title

PR6069.T17C375 2001

823’.914—dc21                                                                                                    00-048018

First Edition: March 2001

Printed in the United States of America

0   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

For Jane, and all victims of the Cassandra Complex

Acknowledgment

The plot of this novel is loosely based on a short story entitled “The Magic Bullet” that appeared in

Interzone 29

in 1989. I am grateful to David Pringle for publishing that story, and to Gardner Dozois and the late Don Wollheim for reprinting it in their respective a

Year’s Best Science Fiction.

I should also like to thank Jane Stableford for proofreading services and helpful commentary, and the late Claire Russell and her husband, Bill, for their great kindness and for the part their ideas played in shaping the background of the story.

The book by Claire and W. M. S. Russell to which the text refers,

Population Crises and Population Cycles

, was published by the Gal-ton Institute in 1999. The book by Garrett Hardin to which the text refers,

The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia

, was published by Oxford University Press in 1999.

PART ONE

The Mouseworld Holocaust

ONE

When Lisa first heard the noise, she wasn’t sure whether it was real or not. She didn’t think she’d been asleep, but she couldn’t be certain. Sometimes, like all confirmed insomniacs, she fell asleep without realizing she had done so—and sometimes she dreamed without actually falling properly asleep.

If the sound had been one of breaking glass or splintering wood, she would have sat up immediately to reach for the phone, but what she had heard—or thought she had heard—was the noise of the front door opening without any force applied to it. That should have been impossible. Both locks had combination triggers as well as swipe slots, and they were supposed to be unhackable. Lisa lived alone, and was not inclined to trust the combinations to anyone else. A member of the police force had to take such precautions very seriously, even if she was a lab-bound forensic scientist who ought to count herself lucky to be clinging on to limited duties now that she was past the official retirement date.

Because it seemed so unlikely that she had heard what she thought she did, Lisa remained quite still, straining her ears for further evidence. She let four or five seconds pass before she even opened her eyes to take a sideways glance at the luminous display on the screen beside her bed. The timer told her it was five minutes to four: the darkest and quietest period of the cold October night.

Then a second noise drew her eyes to the door of her bedroom. There was a certain amount of light filtering through the closed curtains, but she lived on the third floor, too far above the level of the streetlights to obtain much benefit from their yellow glow. The door was shadowed, and she couldn’t tell for sure whether it was opening until she saw the pencil-thin beam of light sneaking through the widening crack—the beam that was guiding the person whose quiet hand was pushing the door open.

Lisa immediately pulled her bare right arm out from beneath the duvet, reaching for the handset suspended beside the screen. She thought she was moving fairly swiftly, but the intruder’s beam had already caught the movement of her arm. Even as her hand made contact, she saw the silhouette of the gun barrel that had been raised to catch the light.

“Don’t touch it!” The voice that spoke was filtered through some kind of distorter that made it sound robotic.

Lisa snatched her hand back, and immediately felt ashamed of her obedience.

“Shit,” said a second voice, sounding from the hallway.

“Shh!” said the first intruder, who was now well into the room, holding the gun no more than a meter from Lisa’s face. “Get on with it. She won’t make any trouble.”

Lisa had been in the police force for more than forty years, but she had never had a gun pointed at her. She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel, but she was fairly certain that she wasn’t afraid—puzzled and a

I ought to be able to identify the weapon, she thought. It was absurdly irritating that the only thing she could see in the beam of the light was an unrecognizable gun. It looked heavy and old—not exactly an antique, but not the sort of dart gun that had recently become fashionable among the young. It could easily have dated back to the turn of the century, maybe even to the period before the handgun ban that had preceded her recruitment to the police force. She knew that she would have to give Mike Grundy an exact account of what was happening, and that Judith Ke