The Cassandra Complex (26 page)

“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
sell
me 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
kind
of 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
is
one 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 Zarathustra
as 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.”