The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [107]
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