The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [127]
“We live in a plague culture,” Lisa said, more for Arachne West’s benefit than Morgan Miller’s. “Any tuppenny-ha’penny Cassandra with half a brain has been able to see for fifty years and more that World War Three would be fought with biological weapons. These days, even hobbyist terrorists use biological weapons if they can get them, in spite of all the problems they pose, because they’re so very modern, so very twenty-first century. And you’ve devised a biological weapon that works only on women—a biological weapon that has no rebound problem, provided that it’s deployed by uncaring males.”
“A nonlethal weapon that would turn most premenopausal women into zombies,” Miller added. “Zombies with the minds of mice.”
“Oh, shit,” Lisa murmured as the corollaries continued to unravel in her imagination. “And Arachne West refused to believe that? The perfect Real Woman wasn’t cynical enough to think that such a thing could exist? Or that there wouldn’t be people queuing up to use it if they knew it existed? Or armies avid to research the possibility, as soon as they knew it could be done?”
The irony in Morgan Miller’s smile was ghastly. “It’s far more probable,” he said, his voice sinking back to a whisper, “that what they couldn’t bring themselves to believe was that if that was really what I had, I’d kept quiet about it. They thought I was just trying to put them off.”
TWENTY-TWO
When Lisa eventually left the room, Morgan Miller stayed on the bed, content to wait. It wasn’t like him to be content to wait, but he didn’t seem to have the strength left to do anything else. He hadn’t been imprisoned very long, and the injuries inflicted by the blowtorch weren’t life threatening in themselves, but he was an old man. The shock to his system had been profound.
When Lisa came through the door, Arachne West commanded her to shut it behind her. She obeyed, but not because of the pistol the Real Woman was passing carelessly from hand to hand.
“You didn’t ask him the big question,” the bald woman observed.
Lisa was mildly surprised, having been more than impressed by the magnitude of the revelations she had obtained. For a moment or two, she thought that Arachne might have “Is it infectious?” in mind, not having been able to follow the details of Morgan’s concluding technical discourse about species-specific variant designs and attachment-mechanism disarmament, but then she realized that she was being stupid.
The big question in Arachne West’s mind was still: “Where’s the backup?”
The members of Stella Filisetti’s hastily contrived conspiracy still hadn’t found a record of the experiments or a map of the primal retrovirus. They had the mice, and the researchers who eventually obtained custody of the mice would be able to work back painstakingly from there, but Morgan Miller still had at least one neatly wrapped package of vital information stashed away, hidden somewhere among the disks, wafers, and sequins they hadn’t been able to remove from his house because their sheer quantity had made it impractical.
“He’ll tell me if I ask,” Lisa assured the Real Woman, “but we need to work out a deal first.”
“Sure,” Arachne said, too willingly to be entirely plausible. “Whatever he wants. As you’re so fond of pointing out, I’ve nothing left to bargain with.” But she was still passing the pistol from hand to hand.
“It is true,” Lisa said. “What he told me just now. I’m sure of it.”
“It’s only a couple of hours since you were equally sure he couldn’t possibly have kept a secret from you for the last thirty-nine years,” the Real Woman pointed out. “But that’s a cheap shot. I know it’s true. I was prepared to believe