The Cassandra Complex

She hadn’t had the option of stepping down thatquietly, although neither Judith Ke

Surprisingly enough, she had played the game well enough to absolve Mike Grundy from all blame except that attached to his carelessness in managing his computer passwords. For that, he got off with a caution. He could have gone back to work, at least for a year or two—so his resignation, like Chan’s, really had been voluntary. As Lisa had anticipated, he had no difficulty in looking after himself, and he required no help from her or Leland or anyone else in finding a new challenge.

Judith Ke

On the whole, though, Lisa couldn’t see that the ending was a particularly happy one. There was no technology of longevity, for women or for men, but there was a nasty weapon that would always be lurking in the background of life, even if it were never actually fired. And no matter how well the measures recommended by the Containment Commission worked, or how cleverly they would be facilitated by the newly resurgent textile industry, Malthus was still right. The world’s overabundant population was still increasing, and the longer that situation persisted, the steeper would be its fall when the bubble eventually burst. Everyone in the world who was blessed or cursed with a fully developed Cassandra Complex was still in the endless tu

Lisa couldn’t believe that the biowar defense mechanisms pioneered by the MOD and private enterprise would be completely effective. If she had ever been tempted to believe that, Chan’s explanation of why his own revolutionary antibody packaging had failed would have put her right. It hadn’t failed because it hadn’t worked, but because it had worked too well.

“If our immune systems could work any better than they do,” he had told her after concluding his deliberately vague technical summary, “natural selection would probably have ensured that they would. The problem posed by viruses of the common cold and of influenza viruses isn’t just a matter of mutation—it’s also a matter of mimicry. The most successful diseases hide their DNA in protein coats that reproduce protein-formations already manifest in the body’s own structures. If the immune system reacts against them too aggressively, it triggers autoimmune responses far more deleterious than the disease effects of the virus—because the most successful diseases are also discreet. Killing one’s host is a very bad survival strategy.

“Colds and flu viruses aren’t very effective mimics because their evolution is driven by natural selection—but you can bet your life that the designers of bioweapons are much better at it. Hyperflu is the equivalent of a shot across civilization’s bow. The real war won’t begin until the autoimmune provocateurs are released—and when they are, any general-purpose responsive system is likely to be turned, producing cures far worse than the diseases. Packaging the systems in clothing rather than in the cells of the body is ingenious, but if the flesh/fabric relationship is intimate enough to allow the systems to work, it’s probably too intimate to prevent them from being turned. In the end, the piecemeal solutions will probably be the ones that work best—and best is a relative term. There is no ultimate defense. Plague war is coming, and billions are going to die. Not next year, or the year after, but soon enough.”

Lisa had to suppose that it was all true, even though Chan couldn’t tell her exactly what it was that Edgar Burdillon had been working on for the MOD, let alone what the fashion industry had waiting for the new season to arrive. So why on earth, she wondered as she turned her back on the ruined room, did she feel so ludicrously cheerful? How could she be looking forward to working for a half-baked organization like the Institute of Algeny? Wasn’t that a defeat, no less ignominious by virtue of the fact that it was a fate she would have to share with Morgan Miller and Chan Kwai Keung?

“You must be sorry to be going,” she said to Morgan as they descended the staircase together. “This place has been your life.”

“No, it hasn’t,” he told her with customary perversity. “I’ve lived my life in the privacy of my own skull, and I’ll live the rest of it in exactly the same place. It doesn’t matter in the least where the props and waste-disposal units are.”

“You never cease to surprise me,” she said sarcastically.

“I doubt that very much,” he countered. “I took the trouble to keep only one thing up my sleeve, and once that became too hot to hold, I became absolutely transparent.”

“Arachne West said she thought you’d done the right thing,” Lisa remembered.

“I’m not about to return the compliment,” Morgan retorted tartly. “My arm still hurts, in spite of all the best resources of modern medicine. Now that the grafts have taken, I’m assured it will heal perfectly, without leaving the slightest scar, but memory’s scars don’t vanish so easily.”

“Well,” said Lisa, “if its any consolation to you, I told her I couldn’t agree.”

The three of them passed through the door that let them out into the parking area, one by one. Then they formed up again to walk abreast to Chan’s Fiat. All the crates they had left behind in the labs and offices would follow in due course. Morgan and Chan weren’t allowed to export their work, of course, but they had piled up an impressive mass of personal paraphernalia over the years.

“It wasn’t a matter of doing the rightthing,” Morgan said, effortlessly picking up the conversational thread. “I didn’t have the advantage of hindsight, and all my hopeful anticipations were betrayed by ugly circumstance. But science can proceed only by trial and error, and the errors are as informative as the successes, in their admittedly meager fashion. I may be a smug, selfish, secretive bastard, but at least I can avoid sanctimony.

“Of course I was wrong, in retrospect—but what a world we might have had if I’d been right! What a world we still might have once we’ve learned the lesson of the impending crisis, and once someone luckier than I has found a means of keeping us forever young without the penalty of eternal i