The Cassandra Complex

Chan, unusually, had already tried the more lucrative option of working for one of the big pharmaceutical companies in the field of animal transgenics, but had decided that he would rather work in the pub-He sector. Most of Lisa’s fellow postgrads thought he was mad, and the fact that he loved to sit and read in a tubular-framed chair in a corner of Mouseworld greatly encouraged that opinion. When Lisa asked him why he had returned to the public sector, he murmured something about finding it difficult to breathe while wearing a gag, adding a gnomic comment to the effect that the air in Mouseworld was naturally bad, and therefore good, rather than u

“Morgan has a jaundiced view of the experiment,” Chan explained late one afternoon when Lisa contrived to distract him from his reading sufficiently to indulge in a long and languid conversation. “He considers that it has made its point and has no further utility, but that is because he has a very limited view of its achievements. He does not appreciate the true value of its spin-off.”

“People do tend to be cynical about spin-off,” Lisa pointed out. “I don’t suppose it’s true that the only spin-off the U.S. space program ever generated was the nonstick frying pan and the stretch-fabric bra, but the fact that people say it’s so is revealing in its way.”

“I did not have that kind of technological spin-off in mind,” Chan admitted, “but even in that arena, Mouseworld has made its contribution. Had its original designers only thought to patent the automatic feeding-and-cleaning system, they might now be on the threshold of a fortune. The apparatus recently built for harvesting human growth hormone from the urine of a population of transgenic mice is a straightforward modification of the architecture of Mouseworld.”

“You’re taking the piss!” Lisa said, her suspicion tempered by pride in the quickness of her wit. “On an industrial scale?”

“Indeed not,” Chan replied, although the faint grin playing at the corners of his mouth suggested that he was not a man who could always resist the temptation to improvise a straight-faced tall tale. “Sheep like Dolly and Polly and calves like Rosie may grab all the headlines, but milk is by no means the only bodily fluid that can be augmented with the aid of transplanted genes. The bladder has many advantages as a bioreactor, partly because urine is continually produced by male as well as female animals, but mainly because it is much less chemically complex than milk, thus making separation of the desired protein much easier.

“Although it is not yet fashionable, I believe that the urine of mice has greater potential as a pharmaceutical carrier than most of its rivals—certainly more than the semen of pigs and probably more than the fluid secretions of rubber trees. Milk is, admittedly, in the ru

“Which the designers failed to patent?”

“Alas, yes. The world was very different then. The so-called ‘Green Revolution’ was pla

“Professor Miller doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for the notion that the four cities are an accurate parable of the human predicament,” Lisa told him.

“Perhaps he is insensitive to the deeper subtleties of the parable,” Chan suggested. “He tends to think of the mice in the central block as something separate from the cities, so when he speaks of Mouseworld as a parable, he only has in mind the population problem, but the population problem is not all there is to Mouseworld, any more than it is all there is to the human world. I am not saying, of course, that every other aspect of the human world is mirrored in the confusion of that magical H—but I do say that those with the eyes to see it will find more mirrors there than they might expect.”

“The models,” Lisa said, to demonstrate that she was on the ball. “Around the walls, the more or less healthy masses, but in the ghetto, the seriously sick.”

In the wake of the Human Genome Project, there had been a boom in the use of transgenic mice as “models” of every known human genetic-deficiency disease. All kinds of gene-based diseases that were difficult to investigate in living human patients could be inflicted on “knockout mice” by deliberately damaging the relevant gene in mouse embryos, which could then produce true-breeding populations of mice, all of whose members were victims. Where variant forms of a still-functional gene were responsible for pathological symptoms, the variant forms could be transplanted from humans into mice in place of the deleted native version, with only a little less trouble. The development of the diseases could be tracked much more closely in model mice because specimens could be killed and dissected at every relevant stage, and the populations also provided valuable preliminary testing grounds for possible treatments and cures.

“That’s right,” said Chan, bowing his head slightly to acknowledge her alacrity. “But you must follow the analogy farther.”

She tried. The evening sun, which was shining in a margin of clear sky but Ht abundant clouds from below, was filling the room with a peculiarly fiery light. Where it reflected from the transparent-plastic faces of the cages, it was more red than gold.

“You mean that the models are temporary residents in Mouseworld,” she ventured eventually. “The business is booming now, but it’ll be a short-term thing. As we find the treatments and the cures, the models will become obsolete—and in the human world too, the genetic-deficiency diseases will begin to disappear.”

“If only it were that simple,” Chan lamented. “Alas, we shall probably be required to keep the models long after their human analogues have become mercifully extinct. Already there are redundant models mingled with the others, mere library specimens sustained in case they should someday become necessary again. Naturally enough, you are thinking of the most obvious applications of the new technology—the battle against Huntington’s disease, Duche

He paused so she could prompt him, but she was still distracted by the temporary play of the unusual light as it filtered through the few portals left to it by Mouseworld’s architects. The pattern of the reflections that redirected the mellow beams into the corners of the vast room seemed quite amazing. Some of the compartments now had faces resembling rose-tinted lenses; others seemed to be ablaze with the glory of Armageddon.