The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [96]
Lisa didn’t know whether to curse the pilot silently or congratulate her audibly, but she settled for saying: “It’s a possibility—but even if that’s so, it might be far more complicated. That’s why Geyer was so keen to stress that you can’t change one aspect of human life without changing others, sometimes unpredictably. But we can’t forget that this is about what Morgan’s kidnappers think he’s got, not what he actually has got. There might be a world of difference. I may be foolishly naive, but I cannot believe, even for an instant, that Morgan could have made a discovery of this magnitude without telling me—or, indeed, anyone else.”
“But we don’t know that he didn’t tell anyone else,” Ginny pointed out, carried away by the flood of her own ingenuity. “Dr. Chan obviously knows something—and it seems to be something he’s reluctant to confide in us before he’s explained it to you.”
Not just a pretty face, Lisa thought. But if you’re right, Ginny darling, and Morgan really does have a technology of longevity whose only downside is that it doesn’t work on people with balls, whose side will you be on come the time when the fat lady sings? Aloud, she said: “I still don’t believe it. Chan wouldn’t keep something like that from me anymore than Morgan would. We go back a long way.”
“As friends,” Smith reminded her.
“As friends,” she echoed. The words obviously meant more to her than they did to Peter Grimmett Smith—but the real question was how much they meant to Chan. Where the hell is Chan? she wondered. And what kind of stupid game is he playing? The sky was brightening again, but it was only the lights of the cityplex looming up in the west, far more perverse than any natural sunrise.
“This is all rather fanciful,” Smith complained. The tone of his voice suggested that he didn’t think much of Ginny’s hypothesis, and not because of Lisa’s lukewarm endorsement. Ginny was, after all, only his driver—and Lisa was a woman on the wrong side of middle age. He didn’t have the same imaginative reach as the flirtatious Matthias Geyer did, and nothing like the same imaginative reach as Stella Filisetti and Arachne West. Perhaps that was a virtue, given that Stella Filisetti’s imagination seemed to have carried her away to ludicrous extremes, and allowed her to persuade at least, half a dozen otherwise sensible individuals that her runaway paranoia might be justified. Could she have been so effective if the world hadn’t been trembling on the brink of plague war? Maybe not. But the world was on that edge, and the knowledge that the men who controlled global commerce—and it probably was men, in the narrow sense—had a solution ready for the marketplace wasn’t as much of a comfort to Lisa as it might have been to Peter Grimmett Smith.
“We’ll find out the whys and wherefores soon enough,” Lisa told him, trying hard to sound as if they weren’t important enough to warrant much expenditure of intellectual effort. “What we need to do is make sure that we’re ready to act when your people have sorted out the good data from the bad. We need some sleep. I do, at any rate.”
She saw Ginny’s helmeted head turn halfway, as if the pilot intended to favor her with a long, hard stare—but the gesture was never completed. Ginny’s eyes went back to her instrument panel, and her lips remained sealed.
“Imagine how I feel,” Peter Grimmett Smith complained, evidently of the opinion that he’d had the harder day. “You’re right, of course—we all need to get our heads down for a while. I was right to insist on seeing the Algenist tonight, though—and however crude and vulgar my understanding of Nietzsche may be, I don’t think they’re the kind of people who ought to be entrusted with whatever Morgan Miller has discovered … if he’s discovered anything at all.”
“They probably think the same about the Ministry of Defence,” Lisa couldn’t help observing.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Smith asked impatiently.
“Merely that our primary interest is national security,” Lisa replied, knowing that it would be wise to reemphasize the fact that she was still on Smith