The Cassandra Complex

“They discovered that you’d found a technology of longevity,” Lisa said. “A technology that might be just as applicable to humans as to mice if the retrovirus could be tweaked. A technology that you had discovered at the turn of the century, and didn’t tell anyone else about until 2041, at which point you approached Dr. Goldfarb and Herr Geyer: both male, and both representative of secretive institutions with hidden agendas. I can understand why Helen Grundy, Arachne West, and other assorted backlash theorists thought that all their worst nightmares had come true. I can even understand why they started using the blowtorch when you tried to persuade them there was a catch that made it all worthless. There isa catch, isn’t there?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “The catch to end all catches. I thought I might be able to work around it somehow, but I couldn’t. Maybe no one can.”

“An army would have stood a better chance than a lone hero,” Lisa pointed out. “That’s what science is supposed to be all about, isn’t it? Many hands make enlightenment work.”

“An army might have,” Morgan agreed. “What worried me was that an army might have liked the problem better than the solution. What’s good for mice isn’t necessarily good for humans—or dogs, come to that. We found out soon enough, way back at the turn of the century, that mouse models of human diseases had their limitations, because mice can tolerate some conditions that humans can’t. Mice may seem primitive and stupid to us, but there are some things they can tolerate that cleverer and more sophisticated mammals can’t.”

“Like emortality?”

“Like rejuvenation. People our age think of rejuvenation in terms of getting back to twenty-one and staying there forever. But what if the stopping point isn’t twenty-one? What if the stopping point is one? My survivor mice got past the point at which they were producing offspring that stabilized at a physicalage estimable in days, but body and mind each have their own aging processes. Mice are creatures of instinct, Lisa—they’re born with ninety percent of what they need to know hardwired into their brains. The little they need to learn can be learned over and over again without too much inconvenience. Even a rat needs to be cleverer than that, and a dog needs to be muchcleverer. You might not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but a young dog has to be able to learn a lot and hold on to it all. The problem with the kind of rejuvenation my mice go in for is that it rejuvenates the brain as well as all the other parts of the body. It wipes out learning almost as fast as the learning goes in.

“What my retrovirus produces, even at the farthest end of the selection process, is emortal mice that are physically mature but mentally infantile. By introducing them into the Mouseworld cities, I eventually managed to prove that mice can live like that, even among their own mortal kind, because they can keep on learning the things they need to learn over and over again. The catch is that they’re probably the most advanced creatures that can.”

“The dogs,” Lisa said remembering. “The dogs on that stupid video the ALF circulated. Their voice-over claimed that the first lot they showed had been primed to produce an autoimmune reaction modeling mad cow disease, but they hadn’t. I knew they hadn’t—but I never thought to find out what hadbeen done to them. They were yours, weren’t they? Another project you hadn’t referred to the Ethics Committee—another breach of the law. You’d rejuvenated them—and the rejuvenation had wiped their minds clean of anything faintly resembling a personality.”

“If whoever filmed them hadn’t been in such a rush to get the product out, they’d have seen far worse,” Morgan admitted. “Are you still interested in taking the treatment, Lisa?”

“Emortality and murder all wrapped up in one little retrovirus,” she said. “The body lives forever but the human being becomes … not quite a vegetable, but not much more than a mouse. A zombie. Worse than a zombie.”

“That’s about the size of it,” he confirmed. “Not that I’ve tried any human experiments, of course. If I’ve missed my chance to have my little discovery enshrined in the textbooks as the Miller Effect, I’ll just have to take my place in the ranks of the historically anonymous. You can understand now why it didn’t seem like a good idea to share it, can’t you? Your friends couldn’t, and that’s part of the reason they wouldn’t believe me, but youcan.”

“We live in a plague culture,” Lisa said, more for Arachne West’s benefit than Morgan Miller’s. “Any tuppe

“A nonlethal weapon that would turn most premenopausal women into zombies,” Miller added. “Zombies with the minds of mice.”

“Oh, shit,” Lisa murmured as the corollaries continued to unravel in her imagination. “And Arachne Westrefused to believe that? The perfect Real Woman wasn’t cynical enough to think that such a thing could exist? Or that there wouldn’t be people queuing up to use it if they knew it existed? Or armies avid to research the possibility, as soon as they knew it couldbe done?”

The irony in Morgan Miller’s smile was ghastly. “It’s far more probable,” he said, his voice sinking back to a whisper, “that what they couldn’t bring themselves to believe was that if that was really what I had, I’d kept quiet about it. They thought I was just trying to put them off.”

TWENTY-TWO

When Lisa eventually left the room, Morgan Miller stayed on the bed, content to wait. It wasn’t like him to be content to wait, but he didn’t seem to have the strength left to do anything else. He hadn’t been imprisoned very long, and the injuries inflicted by the blowtorch weren’t life threatening in themselves, but he was an old man. The shock to his system had been profound.

When Lisa came through the door, Arachne West commanded her to shut it behind her. She obeyed, but not because of the pistol the Real Woman was passing carelessly from hand to hand.

“You didn’t ask him the big question,” the bald woman observed.

Lisa was mildly surprised, having been more than impressed by the magnitude of the revelations she had obtained. For a moment or two, she thought that Arachne might have “Is it infectious?” in mind, not having been able to follow the details of Morgan’s concluding technical discourse about species-specific variant designs and attachment-mechanism disarmament, but then she realized that she was being stupid.

The big question in Arachne West’s mind was still: “Where’s the backup?”

The members of Stella Filisetti’s hastily contrived conspiracy still hadn’t found a record of the experiments or a map of the primal retrovirus. They had the mice, and the researchers who eventually obtained custody of the mice would be able to work back painstakingly from there, but Morgan Miller still had at least one neatly wrapped package of vital information stashed away, hidden somewhere among the disks, wafers, and sequins they hadn’t been able to remove from his house because their sheer quantity had made it impractical.

“He’ll tell me if I ask,” Lisa assured the Real Woman, “but we need to work out a deal first.”

“Sure,” Arachne said, too willingly to be entirely plausible. “Whatever he wants. As you’re so fond of pointing out, I’ve nothing left to bargain with.” But she was still passing the pistol from hand to hand.