The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [77]
“Do we?” Lisa queried.
“They have to be Millenarians,” he said as he shut the fridge door and slumped down at the table with a can in each hand. “The end of the world is nigh, and anyone who wants to be saved has to follow the recipe, no matter how crazy. Anyone who stands in the way is an Antichrist in the direct employ of the Devil.” He offered the right-hand can to Lisa. According to the label, it was Szechuan pollen beer—highly nutritious but difficult to stomach. She shook her head and he shrugged, abandoning it on the tabletop so he could use his right forefinger to crack the seal on the other can.
“What she actually said,” Lisa pointed out, “is that you and I are working for the Secret Masters. Which we are—you directly, me indirectly, at least as long as I let this farce continue. And she could well be right about the impending pandemic too. If the release of hyperflu was the first strike in a biowar—and nobody seriously thinks otherwise, no matter how closely we guard our tongues—then the war probably will kill billions rather than millions, and social structures really will collapse all over the world. Even if the Containment Commission can come up with measures that work, Britain is too closely integrated into the global economy to withstand the aftermath.”
“I already told you we have that covered,” Leland reminded her uneasily.
“So you did,” Lisa agreed. “But you also told me that the Cabal, not the government, would see to the distribution of the defense mechanism. That’s exactly what the Real Woman’s afraid of. She finds the idea of your friends selecting the survivors even harder to bear than the idea of ecocatastrophic collapse.”
“My point exactly,” Leland came back. “She’s a Millenarian. The end is nigh, the New Order is yet to arise. You heard her. Filisetti must have found out about something Miller had fed in—or was intending to feed in—to Burdillon’s defense work. They want the antibody-packaging system for their own people. They probably came back for you because they thought they could use you as a lever to make Miller give it up, but the real key is Chan if he has the only backup not securely stashed on university or Ministry premises. How it must have burned them up to have to leave Burdillon behind at the university when they made their getaway! You were right—it is a wild goose chase. Whatever new wrinkle Miller brought, or intended to bring, to Burdillon’s inquiry, it can’t be as good as ours. We don’t need it—but that doesn’t mean I can let it go. If it’s really out there, I need a copy. A copy will do, but I can’t go back empty-handed. Got to justify my fee. I need to find Chan. We need to get Miller out too, of course, but I need to find Chan as well. Got to cover all the angles.”
Lisa was tempted to tell Leland, merely for the sake of honesty, that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion, but she contented herself by asking a question. “Was she right when she said that the megacorps regard the biowar as the inevitable unfolding of the tragedy of the commons?”
“Always the tragedy of the bloody commons,” Leland muttered. “You’d think we’d have forged a new cliche by now. Even the megacorp buccaneers who’ll fight the Hardinist label till they drop believe in that one. You’ve read the essay, I suppose?”
“Oddly enough,” Lisa confessed, “I never did. Morgan explained the thesis to me, of course—and I did read The Ostrich Factor.”
“That’s not so popular in the ranks of the so-called Secret Masters,” Leland told her. “That’s why half of them refuse point-blank to describe themselves as Hardinists. They hate the Russell Theorem. Remember the Russell Theorem?”
Lisa remembered the Russell Theorem well enough. Given that two other Russells were numbered among Morgan Miller’s favorite sources, Morgan had always taken great care to point out that the Russell approvingly cited by Garrett Hardin was a different one: Bertrand Russell. What Hardin had called Russell’s Theorem was the proposition