The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [42]
She overrode the warning and picked the handset up anyway, but transferred it to her left hand as soon as she had rolled over.
“Yes?” she said.
“Peter Grimmett Smith, Dr. Friemann. I’ve got a car to take us to Ahasuerus. I’ve brought you some breakfast. Five minutes, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
She didn’t have a toothbrush or a comb, and her unsmart outer garments were not only bloodstained, but showing clear signs of long wear. There wasn’t much she could do about any of that; it was the inevitable penalty of clinging too hard to twentieth-century habits. She washed and tidied herself as well as she could, then went down to the lobby to meet Peter Grimmett Smith.
“Better not check out,” he told her. “You might need the room again.”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “But I’ll also need to go home at some stage, unless Mike Grundy or Steve Forrester can delegate someone to bring me some stuff from my wardrobe and bathroom. I’ll need my car too.”
“You can phone one of them later,” Smith said as he led her out to the car. “You really ought to invest in some smarter clothing—that tunic’s ruined.”
His own outer clothes, Lisa noted, were only shaped in an old-fashioned way; the fibers were brand new, as avidly active as anything on the market. Only something as paradoxical as gray power, she thought, could create a market for living fibers that maintained an appearance so staid as to seem more fossilized than dead.
The car was a sleek gray Jaguar with tinted windows. The driver’s window was wound down to reveal a young blond woman with eyes so pale as to seem almost colorless. Smith introduced her as Ginny. As soon as she and Lisa had exchanged nods, Ginny closed the window again, to seal herself away from the eyes of the world.
Smith opened the rear door for Lisa before going around to the other side of the car. The tray built into the back of the front-passenger seat was down; there was a cup of black coffee slotted into it beside a bag containing a flaccid croissant and an over-iced Danish pastry. The cup and the bag were both made of active fibers, though, so the coffee was still hot and the food was warm.
Lisa checked her wristwatch. She had slept through the remainder of the morning and well into the afternoon; it was far too late to be eating breakfast, but she was glad that Smith hadn’t attempted to provide lunch. She had lived alone all her life, and had long since given up hope that food technology would ever deliver a satisfactory prepackaged meal. She went to work on the food, glad of the simultaneous hit she obtained from the caffeine in the coffee and the sugar in the Danish pastry’s embellishments.
As the Jaguar pulled out into traffic, the computer sounded a discreetly mellow-sounding bell, but the screen didn’t flash up any warning messages; it was obviously programmed in a more sensitive way than Mike Grundy’s.
“Get lost,” the driver muttered, presumably addressing the driver in the car behind, who must have reckoned that she should have let him pass first. In several American states, so rumor had it, whole families had been shot to death for less, but British drivers were famed for their restraint. Few of them carried anything more lethal than a pepper spray for self-defense in road-rage incidents.
“Chief Inspector Kenna seems to favor the hypothesis that this is all due to some lunatic fringe group,” Smith told Lisa. “I’ve tried to ease her away from that point of view, but I can’t share my own suspicions while there’s a possibility that Miller’s in possession of a secret with security implications. She’s no fool, though, so she’s keeping in mind the chance that the seemingly amateurish aspects of the assault on your flat are a calculated smoke screen of disinformation. In any case, we should be careful