The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [104]
Sex, of course, was a different matter—so different that they wasted little time in courtship before leaping into bed together.
Morgan Miller explained to Lisa, in dribs and drabs, that he had made an irrevocable decision never to get married. This was not so much because he considered his vocation essentially monkish—although he did have a distinct ascetic streak—but because he could see no virtue or purpose in the institution of marriage other than to provide protective cover for children. He was the kind of man who felt obliged to practice what he preached, and it would have been a flagrant violation of his neoMalthusian credo to bring more children into a world that was heading for a population crisis, so there was no earthly need for him to get married. To do so, even if he made his intentions clear to his intended spouse, would have constituted a misrepresentation of sorts. Even a long-term monogamous relationship without benefit of ceremony would have been a compromise reeking of bad faith. He had, of course, taken the precaution of obtaining a vasectomy, by courtesy of the local Marie S topes Clinic, but that had not been sufficient to clarify his peculiar conscience, so he explained to Lisa with all due alacrity that he did not intend to enter into a long-term relationship with her, and would terminate their arrangement if ever it seemed likely to become habitual.
Lisa, at twenty-two, could not imagine that she would continue to see Morgan Miller once she had obtained her doctorate and committed herself completely to some newly hatched state-of-the-art police laboratory, so she had not thought the assertion worth exploring, let alone challenging. She was, however, prepared to tease him about the firmness of his resolution not to maintain the presence of his own precious genes within the great human pool.
“You don’t believe in positive eugenics, I take it,” she felt free to observe after they had consummated their purely utilitarian relationship for the third time, nineteen days after their first meeting. He was the proud possessor of an exceedingly capacious bed whose cast-iron frame and carved head- and footboards must have dated from the Edwardian era, when presumably it had been designed to accommodate a whole family. It was pleasantly situated near the neatly net-curtained southwest bay windows of an equally venerable detached house on the gentler slope of Beacon Hill. It was the ideal venue for idle conversation in the late afternoons of autumn, and Lisa was already looking forward to the sultry evenings of summer.
“I don’t believe in taking genetic determinism to absurd lengths,” Miller told her in response to her question. “I’m an undistinguished specimen, physically speaking, and the quality of my mind has far more to do with my education than any genes I might have inherited from two parents, one an accountant, the other a primary-school teacher. I have, of course, deposited an abundant sample of my semen in a convenient gene bank, in case the world should ever feel that it needs more of my kind, but I am content to leave that decision to those who come after me. It is entirely possible that I shall accomplish far more by winning converts to the cause of algeny than by spreading fertile semen far and wide.”
“What’s algeny?” Lisa asked, as he had clearly intended her to do.
“The true scientific successor to alchemy. Chemistry never had the same objectives, and the fact that inorganic chemistry evolved so much faster than the chemistry of life distorted subsequent opinions as to the nature of the alchemical enterprise. Algeny is the science-based art of practical evolution: the constructive use of our newfound genetic wisdom. I am trying hard to popularize the term, as are a few other enlightened souls, but we have made little progress as yet.”
Such pillow talk as Lisa had been involved in before meeting Morgan Miller had tended to the monosyllabic, and she definitely preferred the new kind, even while recognizing the absurdity of its contrived pomposity.
“So you won