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By Root 1271 0

left alone to find its own solution. There, if nowhere else, was a government that was not content to hope that the crisis would somehow be averted, or that the aftermath of the human depopulation crisis would follow the pattern now set by the mice of Rome and London, Paris and New York. China was the nation that had weathered more population crises in its own history than any other, and perhaps the only one whose leaders had really learned anything from the bitter experiences of their forebears. But Chan Kwai Keung was not in Hong Kong now. He was in England, where prosperity obscured all anxiety about a population whose increase had not yet been eliminated by the continual decline in the birth rate. In England, the most common view was that the population explosion was a “Third World problem” that did not apply to the developed nations, where women were marrying later and an increasing number were choosing not to marry at all.

Lisa herself had no intention of marrying or of having children. She could not imagine why so many women became broody, and she fervently hoped that no such misfortune would ever befall her—although even she was sometimes disposed to wonder whether this was evidence of something lacking in herself, some element of instinct lost to casual mutation. How many of us, she wondered, are nature’s knockout mice—and what, if so, are we modeling? The spectrum of human potential, or the range of potential folly?

“The architects seem to have taken as much care to isolate London, Paris, Rome, and New York from the rest of Mouseworld as our own governments have taken to isolate West from East and North from South,” Lisa agreed, “but at the end of the day, all the mice in the world have common problems. The ecosphere has its boundaries, but we all draw on the same resources and we all piss into the same pond. If the population boom does turn to a catastrophic collapse, it will affect all of us. No matter how we guard our individual cages, we’ll all go down together when we go.”

“There you are,” said Chan lightly. “If we only look with educated eyes, we can see all manner of parables in this awesome confusion. Now that we have penetrated the darkest secrets of DNA, we are in some danger of forgetting that the actual actors in the world’s drama are not disembodied genes, but firmly embodied organisms. Forensic science may deal almost exclusively in the future with the DNA extracted from smears and stains, but the criminals it convicts will all be whole organisms. Their genes may betray them, but cannot accurately define them.”

“That’s very good,” Lisa said, meaning the compliment sincerely. “This place is by no means short of would-be philosophers, but you’re the real thing, aren’t you?”

“Very much so,” he assured her. “So is Morgan Miller, in his own contradictory way. And so are you, if I may say so, despite your strange ambition.”

“I like the idea of solving vexatious problems,” she told him. “I like the idea of catching evildoers.”

“Common criminals will always get caught,” Chan told her, his voice retreating to a whisper and taking on an unaccountable chill, “but most evildoers, alas, go unrecognized and unchallenged. Perhaps it would be different if we were able to recognize the evils extrapolated in our own actions, but we are little better than mice as natural mathematicians—or, for that matter, as natural moralists.”

“Maybe,” said Lisa, still responding to his lightly veiled criticism of her chosen vocation, “but we have to do what we can, don’t we?”

“We should,” he agreed as the light of the setting sun added a hint of flame to his polished flesh, “and perhaps we shall.”

PART TWO

The Ahasuerus Ambush

SEVEN

Lisa’s first interview with Peter Grimmett Smith took place in a ground-floor seminar room. The setting would have seemed incongruous in any case, but it happened to be a room in which she had once chaired population-dynamics seminars for Morgan Miller. It had been redecorated and refurbished long ago, but the smart bio-plastic on the floor bore exactly the same pattern as the