The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [83]
“It sounds irrelevant” Smith told her.
“Unlike the Institute of Algeny, I suppose,” Lisa said. “I think we’d get to the heart of the problem a lot faster if I could talk to an old friend of mine—Arachne West.” She figured it was safe to say that much, even with Leland listening in. As soon as Mike Grundy saw the Real Woman at the cottage, he’d remember Arachne, and he’d start looking for her. Leland would find out about that soon enough, if he cared to. But Lisa wasn’t about to say any more, for the present. Now didn’t seem to be the right time to inform Peter Smith—or anyone else—that she had a shrewd suspicion as to who might have recruited Arachne and her loyal troopers to assist in the kidnapping of Morgan Miller, or that she had formed a plausible hypothesis as to why that person thought the discovery that Miller might or might not have made was worth killing for.
“Arachne West will have to wait,” Smith informed her brusquely. “I have a trail of my own to follow, and I may need your advice again.”
“Okay,” said Lisa, knowing there was nothing she could do about it. “So we go to Swindon first.”
She couldn’t help resenting the digression, but she knew she had to make the best of it. The quicker they got through the interview with the Algenists, the sooner the helicopter would be on its way westward again. In the meantime, she had to take the opportunity to reconsider her own long-term strategy as carefully and profoundly as she could. She had to figure out exactly whose side she ought to be on, if her guesses turned out to be correct, when the cracked plot finally fell apart. That would be a lot easier, she supposed, if she could only work out what Stella Filisetti had meant when she claimed to know how Lisa had “kept her own options open.” The one enigma her guesswork hadn’t even begun to unravel centered on how she was supposed to prove she had known all along what this uproar was all about, when she hadn’t known at all.
If the radfems believed, however mistakenly, that Morgan Miller really had stumbled onto a technology of longevity that worked only on females, why would they think that she would have had to do anything to keep her options open?
FIFTEEN
The night through which the helicopter soared was clear of cloud, but the light pollution was too intense to allow the stars to be seen. The moon was three-quarters full and the pink stain cast on its face by the intervening atmosphere seemed slightly sinister, as if it were an extension of the vale of shadow that hid the invisible crescent.
The vibration that crept into Lisa’s limbs from the polished plastic upholstery seemed to be growing more intrusive with every minute that passed. Although she had relaxed into her seat with some relief after the constant tension of the interrogations in the cottage, Lisa felt that she was already back on the edge of experience. She began to wish she had taken advantage of Leland’s invitation to raid the fridge at the cottage. Hunger was now adding to the confusion of troubles by which she was beleaguered, although not as much as exhaustion was.
Peter Smith finally thought of asking Lisa how her hand and arm were.
“They’re okay,” she assured him. “Leland gelled the dart wound. I’ll be able to peel the sealant off my hand tomorrow, and I should be able to use it normally. I could do with some sleep, though—some real sleep, that is. My usual insomnia seems to have deserted me in my hour of need. I don’t know why,