The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [82]
“You’d have to explain it to me too, I’m afraid,” Smith said unenthusiastically. “But not now. We’ve more important matters to deal with.”
The niceties of post-backlash feminism obviously interested him as little as they interested Leland. Lisa had to remind herself that Smith, like her, had been born in the late twentieth century and had been delivered by maturity into the midst of the so-called backlash. Like Leland, he took it for granted that people he didn’t agree with were all essentially alike. Lisa knew better—and she suspected that the internal politics of twenty-first-century feminism might have a significant bearing not merely on the motive for Morgan Miller’s abduction, but on its ultimate outcome.
Real Women hadn’t seen the stalling of the feminist cause as an unfortunate failure of a crusade to win equality of opportunity and reward. For them, as Arachne West had taken great pains to explain, the battle had always been a straightforward power struggle. What men had surrendered in the late twentieth century was no more than a series of palliative concessions, intended to blunt the force of female complaint and produce the illusion that progress would continue to be made if only women could be patient. The Real Women weren’t interested in inching toward equality; they wanted to take as much ground as possible as quickly as possible by any means available—and they didn’t see any virtue in stopping when the balance was even. They wanted the upper hand, although they didn’t have any illusions about the difficulty of taking it. That tied in to their unbounded enthusiasm for “natural physical culture.”
Although the movement’s brief popularity had passed by 2035 at the latest, the remaining Real Women still saw themselves as units in an army of conquest. Other feminists might see them as misfits unable to compromise with the demands of the moment, but that only made it all the more remarkable that the Real Woman had been fighting shoulder to shoulder with Stella Filisetti—and that Stella had had the gun that fired real bullets. The conspiracy whose outlines had now been revealed was, Lisa knew, far more remarkable than Leland or Peter Grimmett Smith could imagine.
“We need to find Chan,” Lisa told Smith. “They may go after him again.”
“We have people on that,” Smith assured her. “So has Chief inspector Kenna. Dr. Chan’s behaving rather irresponsibly, I fear. Professor Burdillon should never have admitted him to the research program.”
“According to Leland,” Lisa told him, “the project was and is redundant. He says that the princes of private enterprise already have a method of protecting their clients from the effects of plague war. Presumably, the only reason they haven’t advertised it already is that they’re letting paranoia inflate demand. It’s nice to know that all those Mexican, Nigerian, and Cambodian kids are dying in a good cause, isn’t it?”
Peter Grimmett Smith was staring at her, but it wasn’t the thought of millions of Third World children dying for lack of a defense that had startled him; it was the thought that the megacorps hadn’t deigned to inform his government of the fact that they had the means to save whomever they wanted to save from the war that wasn’t officially a war at all.
“Chan was right all along,” Lisa remarked.
“I can’t agree,” Smith retorted. “This ludicrous insistence on talking to you before he parts with whatever information he has is holding up the investigation.”
“Not about that,” Lisa said. “About the politics of Mouseworld. He always said that it was a better mirror of contemporary human affairs