The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [128]
“So why did you start burning him?”
Arachne shrugged. “You know how it is with committee decisions,” she said. “There’s always some stupid fucker who won’t fall in with the party line. Collective responsibility always gives birth to collective irresponsibility. It wasn’t vindictiveness, Lisa—not on my part, anyhow. If I’d been running the show … but you know how the spirit of sisterhood works. Discussion good, hierarchy bad. Result: confusion decaying into chaos. I knew we’d lost the plot the moment he opened his mouth. You know what? I actually think he was right. I think he did the right thing, at least up to a point. There really are some things that man was not meant to know. Never thought I’d say that. Could I get anyone else to see it the same way, though? Could I fuck. Crazy times, hey?”
“I don’t,” Lisa murmured.
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t think he did the right thing. Not even up to a point. He should have let other people in. Not necessarily me, but somebody. Ed Burdillon or Chan. It’s not just collective responsibility that mothers irresponsibility if you don’t take precautions.”
Arachne West shook her head slightly, but there wasn’t the least hint of a smile about her forceful features. “‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,’” she quoted. “Always been one of my favorites. So why’d you do it, Lisa? Have your ova stripped and frozen, I mean. That looked very suspicious. Could even have got you killed if Stella and the other loose cannons had blasted off a few broadsides.” She obviously didn’t know how close she was to the truth.
Lisa sat down on the edge of the desk. “It was one of the things I used to debate with Morgan, back in the days when we were as close as close could be. Although he admitted that one of the major causes of the population explosion was the clause in the UN’s Charter of Human Rights that guaranteed everyone the right to found a family, he wasn’t opposed to it, and he didn’t altogether approve of the Chinese approach limiting family size by legislation. What was really needed, he always argued, was for people to accept the responsibility that went with the right: to exercise the right in a conscientious fashion, according to circumstance.
“There had been times in the past, he said, and might be times in the future, when the conscientious thing to do was to have as many children as possible as quickly as possible—but in the very different circumstances pertaining in the early years of the twenty-first century, the conscientious thing to do was to postpone having children for as long as possible. To refuse to exercise the right to found a family was, in his opinion, a bad move, because human rights are too precious to be surrendered so meekly. His solution to the problem had been to make a deposit in a sperm bank, with the proviso that it shouldn’t be used until after he was dead.
“I decided, in the end, to do likewise—but there was a slight technical hitch. Donor sperm was easy to acquire and by no means in short supply, but the procedure to remove eggs from a woman’s ovaries is much more invasive. Eggs were in such short supply that there was no provision in the contract for the kind of delay clause Morgan inserted. A donation was supposed to be a donation, and that was that—but the bank was prepared to make an informal compromise and agree to leave my eggs on long-term deposit unless the need became urgent. I figured that the principle remained the same, so I settled for that. It had nothing to do with Morgan’s emortality research.”
“Are you sure?” the Real Woman asked.
Lisa saw immediately what Arachne was getting at. Morgan had persuaded her to make the deposit. The arguments he had used were good ones, but in view of what she now knew, they probably had not been the ones foremost in his mind. Back in the first decade of the new millennium, he must have hoped that all the problems he’d so far encountered with his new technology were soluble. He must have hoped