The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [112]
Lisa attempted to undermine these opinions with as much subtlety as she could muster, but she couldn’t entirely control the temptation to excoriate them with a Müleresque fervor. She even tried to soften that kind of blow by crediting the most scathing observations to Morgan Miller and delicately refraining from lending them her own wholehearted endorsement, but the tactic never worked.
“Your problem, Lisa,” Helen said to her with treacly concern, on the last occasion when Lisa attempted a full-scale conversion, in 2024 or 2025, “is that you’ve sold out. You know deep down that that’s what you’ve done, but you can’t bear to face it—so you cover it up with all these layers of dismissive arrogance and barbed sarcasm. You’ll never be happy until you can be reconciled with your own conscience, and you’ll never achieve that unless you can tear down the walls of false consciousness you’ve erected in your psyche.”
“It’s kind of you to lend me your expertise when I’m not one of your clients,” Lisa replied as mildly as she could, “but I’m happy as I am, and joining the police—for me as well as for Mike—was more a matter of buying in than selling out. We all have to do what we can, in our different but complementary ways, to hold society back from the brink of chaos.”
“I’ve heard you say many a time that nothing can stop us from going over that brink,” Helen pointed out sweetly. “Too many children in the world. Masculine science does love its simple explanations, doesn’t it?”
“Even if a fall is inevitable,” Lisa replied, “it still makes sense to delay it as long as possible. When the collapse begins, good policing will be even more essential than it is today—and science offers the only hope we have of getting the parachute open before the fall becomes a fatal crash.”
“The only remedy we’ll ever have against disaster is the capacity to treat one another with courtesy and charity,” Helen informed her.
There was no point in contradicting Helen’s ready assumption that courtesy and charity were essentially female virtues—or, indeed, in denying most of her other assumptions. She was not the kind of person to admit that she might be fundamentally mistaken, and for all her feminist philosophizing, she certainly couldn’t allow the possibility that a plainer and older woman might have the advantage of her. So Lisa gave up trying to be a friend to Mike and Helen alike, and contented herself with maintaining half a friendship with Mike alone. It was not so great a loss as all that, especially while she still had Morgan Miller, Ed Burdillon, and Chan Kwai Keung. Or so it seemed, until the day when everything fell apart.
PART FOUR
The Miller Effect
NINETEEN
Mike Grundy had pulled the Rover off the road, blocking the driveway of a house on North Road. Lisa left her own car on the roadway, even though traffic was beginning to build up and she was sure to get in the way of vehicles filtering out of Hadley Road into the left-hand lane of North Road. As if suddenly uncertain of his purpose, the detective stopped in his tracks when he saw Chan emerge from the passenger seat, flattening himself against the fender as horns began to blare.
“It’s okay, Mike,” Lisa said.
Grundy waited by the Rover while they made their separate ways to stand side by side confronting him. The expression on his face was troubled, but the trouble was a mere mask pasted over a deep-seated exhaustion.
“Sorry, Mike,” Lisa said. “I needed to see you. Now I need you to take Chan in for me. Don