The Cassandra Complex (31 page)

“I see,” Lisa was quick to say, anxious not to be forced back into a purely submissive role, meekly accepting of his penetrative wisdom. “You’re talking about holism versus reductionism—holism being seen as metaphorically female, with an emphasis on consensus and conciliation, while reductionism is metaphorically male, on account of being individualistic and imperialistic. But every geneticist knows that it’s a false dichotomy—and even if it weren’t, I can’t see how it’s spoiled a whole generation of American scientists.”

“That’s not what I said,” Miller pointed out. “What I lamented is its present effect on the raw material of science: the brains of the young. In recent years, far too many feminists have been sidetracked into compiling what they imagine to be a feminist critique of science and technology, criticizing their supposedly excessive masculinity—and however nonsensical such critiques may be, they have had their influence on educational practice and evaluation. It won’t last, of course—feminists will realize soon enough that they have been tricked.”

“Tricked? By the great secret conspiracy of male chauvinists?”

“Where large numbers of people have identical interests, no conspiracy is needed to make them act in concert,” he replied, taking such evident delight in his cleverness that Lisa almost suspected him of applying a peculiar kind of intellectual algeny, by means of which he was assiduously weaving the residual pleasure of their recent sexual activity into something more purely intellectual. “The victories that feminism has won in the economic arena have not been without their cost, and consciousness-raising works both ways. The same arguments that alerted women to all they had been unjustly denied also alerted men to the fact that they would have to adopt different tactics if they were to ensure that they were to continue to maintain even a fraction of their former advantages. Their strategy was obvious: they had to persuade women to cherish at least a few of the chains of their former bondage. Their greatest victory to date has been the acceptance by so many women that what they
really
wanted to advance was the cause of
femininity
, with all its inherent softness, modesty, and thirst for affection.

“Unfortunately, that has meant that far too many of the young women currently determined to make a career in science embark upon that career without a suitably abrasive attitude of mind. What is worse, many of them flatly refuse to acknowledge the desirabüity of acquiring such an attitude. Many of the best recruits to American science, in consequence, come from the poorer countries, whose citizens all know perfectly well that Ufe is warfare and that the powerless can gain power only by usurping the privileges of the powerful.”

Lisa conceded privately that if there really had been points at stake, Miller would have scored at least nine for technical merit and another eight for artistic impression. She thought she knew him well enough, even on such short acquaintance, to suppose that he not only meant every word of what he said, but also believed she ought to know it too, if she were to be educated in all the fields of his expertise.

All she said in return was: “Isn’t that kind of hard Darwinism deeply unfashionable nowadays?”

“Certainly,” he said. “Especially in America. Creationism is, by contrast, quite fashionable there. Nowhere in the world is the impending end of civilization anticipated with such naked glee, especially among people determined not merely to see their neighbors perish, but to assist them in the perishing.”

“Very masculine, survivalism,” Lisa observed. “Creationism too.”

“Very,” Miller agreed. “Backlashes always tend to the extreme, and to the ridiculous. We shall see a great deal of extremism and absurdity before we die, my darling. We shall see backlashes against backlashes, and a human world drowning in its own uncontrollable adrenaline. We are of the generation that will be privileged to take part in the first lemming year of humankind, no matter how the rags and tatters of femininity may rail against it—but we ourselves do not have to be lemmings, any more than we have to be Calhounian rats or Mouseworld mice. We have the vocation of science to serve our needs. We can be bystanders—not innocent bystanders, I admit, but bystanders nevertheless—provided that we maintain the abrasiveness of our minds and are not so reckless as to give hostages to fortune by having children.”

In subsequent conversations, of which by far the majority were held in less comfortable arenas, Lisa heard Morgan Miller’s prognosis of the current crisis in human affairs at much greater length, and in infinitely finer detail. She listened to his rhapsodic analyses of the possible scope of the imaginary art of algeny. She bore witness to his careful sifting of the aphoristic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. She patiently tolerated his speculative investigations of the strategy and tactics of the biological warfare that would supply the means by which World Wars Three and Four were bound to be fought. She helped him to discover and expand the unique pathology of his peculiar Cassandra Complex.

Lisa had always thought herself to be the last person in the world to resent the lack of romance in a sexual relationship, but Morgan Miller certainly tested her limits in that regard. From the very beginning, she regarded him as a challenge to—and perhaps the ultimate test of—her own ideals and principles.

In the beginning, at least, she was proud of the way in which she coped with him. She honestly believed she was adapting him to her own purposes while he was adapting her to his. Theirs, she thought, was an honest contract for the pleasurable use of one another’s sexual parts, and no sort of marriage at all.

Later, she began to doubt herself, and when that happened, she had perforce to doubt him too, but for a year and more she was convinced that the two of them had the whole art and science of human relationships well and truly licked.

She slept with Chan Kwai Keung too, but only twice. It was not that he was in any real danger of falling deeply in love with her, but the intricacy of his mind would not let him treat their sexual intercourse superficially. It made him more introspective and self-doubtful, and that was not the effect Lisa wanted to have. Morgan Miller was by no means incapable of self-doubt, but it required a far more powerful stimulus to bring it out in him.

She never slept with Edgar Burdillon, although she spent almost as much time with him on a day-by-day basis as she did with Morgan, because he had at least as much to teach her about laboratory technique and biomolecular analysis. She found him more comfortable company than Morgan or Chan, and did not want to prejudice that ease of association by undue complication. No matter how abrasive a mind became, it still required comfortable refuges, and Ed Burdillon became one such refuge, all the more valuable to her because it was part and parcel of her working environment.

If she’d had to guess, in the summer of 2003, Lisa would have correctly estimated that Ed Burdillon would one day be head of the department, and that Morgan Miller would still be working alongside him, but she would have taken it for granted that Chan and she would both move on.

If she had been asked, in the summer of 2003, what it would signify if she and Chan were still around in 2041, she would have judged it evidence of failure, indolence, or cowardice.

If she had been invited, in the summer of 2003, to estimate the year in which the world’s population would finally peak and the great collapse would begin, she would probably have said 2040, although she would have hoped secretly that the estimate might be ten or twenty years too early.

Morgan Miller’s lectures on the neoMalthusians were fun—maybe the best fun available to Lisa outside of his bed during the winter of 2002-3, which turned out to be the worst of the zero years—and she actually began to relish the prospect of lending him assistance by supervising the supportive seminars in the following academic year.

Although, Miller, as a confirmed lover of aphorisms, was prepared to borrow telling phrases from the likes of Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin, his actual teaching drew far more heavily on the hard data that had been patiently collated by Claire and W. M. S. Russell in
Population Crises and Population Cycles
in order to add statistical detail to their accounts of humankind’s previous flirtations with extreme population density. Each such flirtation had been facilitated by a great leap forward in agricultural science or technologies of irrigation, and each one had its own idiosyncratic features by courtesy of its specific social context, but the raw numbers always told the same story. Case by case, from China and “monsoon Asia” through the Near East and Europe to Mexico and the Andes, Miller followed the Russells’ analyses of the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of the ecological impact of their numbers, bringing all known history and a substantial fraction of prehistory into a single, overarching frame.

The tide of figures was irresistible, and by the time Miller began to speak to his students about the predicament of the modern world, there was no room left for doubt that the crisis of contemporary civilization was new and unprecedented in only one significant respect: the fact that it was global.

“The numbers are larger than they have ever been before, of course,” he said with awesome casualness, “and the technological efforts that have permitted their inflation have been bolder than could ever have been conceived in any earlier era—but the only truly significant difference is that the impending collapse, which we cannot avert, but only postpone, will not be localized. We shall not be making a little desert, or laterizing the soil of a single plain; we shall be laying waste to the entire world. The survivors will hate and despise us for it. We shall seem far worse in their eyes than the conquering hordes of Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan, because we are motivated not by dreams of glory, but by cowardice and willful blindness. They will be right to hate and despise us, because we know what we are doing, and will not refuse to do it. They will know that we had a choice, and that what we chose to do was to destroy the world. Our gift to the children whose presence will bring about that destruction is a poisoned chalice from which billions will drink premature death. How can they help thinking of us as perverse as well as evil? Why should they?”

The seminars supporting the lectures were not, of course, as livery as Morgan Miller hoped. In that respect, at least, he was a poor prophet, misled by residual optimism. The audiences were thin, and most of the students who actually bothered to turn up spent their time meekly waiting to write down what he said, in case they needed to reproduce it in an essay or a final exam.

Lisa rarely bothered to write anything down at all. She had never made any conscious concession to tradition or ritual, and her policy was never to make a note of anything that could be looked up on the net or in a library. Life was too short.

“It might not be as bad as you suppose,” she once suggested to Miller, though not in any public arena. “The traditional Malthusian checks are making new progress in their long war of attrition. The poor are starving in ever-greater numbers now that compassion fatigue has firmly set in, and the war business is booming. Even the bacteria are striking back now that they’ve developed immunity to so many antibiotics, and global warming is increasing the violence of the weather by leaps and bounds. Maybe the rate of increase will level off at a sustainable level.”

“Too little too late,” was his gloomy retort. “Medical science is far too efficient to let the bacteria catch up. The war business is far too businesslike. Compassion fatigue is localized. We have no reason to think that the existing population can be sustained in the long term.”

“But you admit that the same advances in biology that underlie medial science will transform the war business,” Lisa pointed out. “As the territorial imperative gradually overwhelms us and sends the whole world crazy, we’ll surely have the weapons we need not merely to reduce but to manage the population. You and I might be on the side of the angels in terms of what
we
do with DNA, but Porton Down is less than fifty miles away.”

“It’ll be too little too late,” Miller insisted. “In any case, the last people who ought to be in charge of demographic management are generals and politicians. In time, no doubt our children’s children might make the kinds of social adjustments that the citizen mice of Mouseworld have made—but like the citizen mice of Mouseworld, they won’t be able to do it until they’ve been through at least one population crash, and maybe more than one. With luck, I’ll be a very old man by the time I see my nightmares coming true—but you’re twelve years younger than I am. You stand to lose that much more than I do.”

“I’ll go down fighting,” Lisa said flatly.

“I know you will,” he replied.

It was the first real compliment he had paid her. Unfortunately, it remained the best for far too long.

If Lisa had been asked, in the summer of 2003, whether she really intended to go down fighting, she would have said “Yes” and said it very firmly—but if anyone had asked her to specify exactly what the fight would entail, she would have been unable to do so.

She knew even then that there was bound to be a fight of some sort, but she could not tell who or what the enemy might be with whom she could actually become engaged.

When she completed her work at the university, she moved to a brand-new lab faculty that was only two miles away, but it was like stepping into a different world.

The rapid advancement of forensic science since the advent of DNA fingerprinting and its importance in supplying evidence for criminal prosecutions had necessitated a radical overhaul of its institutional structure. The lab into which Lisa moved was part of a series of experiments attempting to discover by trial and error the ideal relationship between the CID’s operations and the evidential analysts. It had been placed in the same building, and every plausible measure had been taken to ensure that scientists and policemen would become parts of a single tight-knit community. The intention was a noble one, and the hazard proved in the long run not to be a total loss, but for those abruptly thrown in at the deep end and required to make the dream come true, it was a taxing challenge.