The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [140]
Judith Kenna had also walked away from the affair without the slightest blot on her reputation. Lisa never heard whether or not Peter Grimmett Smith had been tokenistically censured by the oafs who had thrown him in at the deep end without adequate support, but she hoped that he’d escaped more or less unscathed. Because Morgan Miller declined to give any testimony relevant to the charges of abduction and malicious wounding, the CPS had to drop them, and the specific individuals who had taken part in the raid on Lisa’s flat and the bombing of Mouseworld were never conclusively identified. The only person to serve a jail sentence was Helen Grundy, who had been given three months for vandalism, although she had been released on amnesty after a fortnight. Stella Filisetti had contrived, with the aid of a good lawyer, to obtain release. Lisa assumed that she would be continuing her promising career as a loose cannon, although she had been refused access to her former equipment. Arachne West had never even been arrested.
On the whole, though, Lisa couldn’t see that the ending was a particularly happy one. There was no technology of longevity, for women or for men, but there was a nasty weapon that would always be lurking in the background of life, even if it were never actually fired. And no matter how well the measures recommended by the Containment Commission worked, or how cleverly they would be facilitated by the newly resurgent textile industry, Malthus was still right. The world’s overabundant population was still increasing, and the longer that situation persisted, the steeper would be its fall when the bubble eventually burst. Everyone in the world who was blessed or cursed with a fully developed Cassandra Complex was still in the endless tunnel, still unable to glimpse the light, still laboring under the curse of helplessness.
Lisa couldn’t believe that the biowar defense mechanisms pioneered by the MOD and private enterprise would be completely effective. If she had ever been tempted to believe that, Chan’s explanation of why his own revolutionary antibody packaging had failed would have put her right. It hadn’t failed because it hadn’t worked, but because it had worked too well.
“If our immune systems could work any better than they do,” he had told her after concluding his deliberately vague technical summary, “natural selection would probably have ensured that they would. The problem posed by viruses of the common cold and of influenza viruses isn’t just a matter of mutation—it’s also a matter of mimicry. The most successful diseases hide their DNA in protein coats that reproduce protein-formations already manifest in the body’s own structures. If the immune system reacts against them too aggressively, it triggers autoimmune responses far more deleterious than the disease effects of the virus—because the most successful diseases are also discreet. Killing one’s host is a very bad survival strategy.
“Colds and flu viruses aren’t very effective mimics because their evolution is driven by natural selection—but you can bet your life that the designers of bioweapons are much better at it. Hyperflu is the equivalent of a shot across civilization’s bow. The real war won’t begin until the autoimmune provocateurs are released—and when they are, any general-purpose responsive system is likely to be turned, producing cures far worse than the diseases. Packaging the systems in clothing rather than in the cells of the body is ingenious, but if the flesh/fabric relationship is intimate enough to allow the systems to work, it’s probably too intimate to prevent them from being turned. In the end, the piecemeal solutions will probably be the ones that work best—and best is a relative term. There is no ultimate defense. Plague war is coming, and billions are going to die. Not next year, or the year