The Cassandra Complex Part 11

"Not about that," Lisa said. "About the politics of Mouseworld. He always said that it was a better mirror of contemporary human affairs than Morgan would ever allow, and he was right. No matter how hard we pretended, Mouseworld's cities were always ruled from without, not from within. The imperatives of birth and death, and the conditions in which life had to be lived, were all determined by the experimenters: the Secret Masters. They always had the power to decide how many mice there were, which ones lived and which ones died. The mice only had to find their own stability because the experimenters refused to intervene-which they could have done at any time, according to their merest whim or most careful long-term strategy. Sound familiar?"

"It sounds irrelevant" irrelevant" Smith told her. Smith told her.

"Unlike the Inst.i.tute 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 a.s.sist 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 pa.s.sed. 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 a.s.sured 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, but knockout drops don't do the trick. I woke up just as tired as I was before I fell unconscious."

"I know the feeling," Smith admitted. "We'll fly back to the Renaissance as soon as the Algenists' spokesman has given us his side of the story. I'm beginning to wish I'd taken a couple of hours out this morning, while you were resting."

Lisa resented the implication that she'd wimped out when she'd accepted Smith's offer to take time out from the investigation, but it wasn't worth challenging. "Why all the urgency to get to the Inst.i.tute of Algeny?" she asked.

"I'm using the helicopter because I'm reasonably confident that it isn't bugged," Smith said, misunderstanding the import of her question. "At least I was reasonably confident until we took you you aboard." aboard."

"You mean that the car was was bugged? You had it swept?" bugged? You had it swept?"

"As per routine," he said. "We'd picked up two plants that weren't there when we left the Renaissance-one obvious, one camouflaged. Presumably planted by the same person. If the first one was there to attract our attention so we wouldn't look hard for the second, the second could have been there to stop us short of looking really really hard for a third." hard for a third."

Lisa knew that Leland had had the time, the opportunity, and the motive to rig the car after staging his flamboyant rescue, but she also knew how dangerous it was to jump to conclusions.

"And you think the Algenists are involved?"

Smith sighed. "I don't know," he confessed. "But the background check makes them look exceedingly fishy. It seems to me that they're the people most likely to have grabbed Morgan Miller."

"Why would they do that? He went to them."

"The fact that he went to them could have convinced them that he had something valuable. If he then decided to take it to Ahasuerus instead of handing it to them-and it seems to me that if he did any any kind of proper background check, that's what he'd have decided to do-they might well have figured it was time to take matters into their own hands." kind of proper background check, that's what he'd have decided to do-they might well have figured it was time to take matters into their own hands."

It didn't sound at all likely to Lisa, but that was the emerging pattern of the investigation. Everyone who looked into the matter seemed to be seizing on different details-details that reflected the particular tenor of their own innate paranoia. Am I any different? Am I any different? she wondered. she wondered. Am I seeing it the way I do because that's what tickles my idiosyncratic fancy? Are we all so terrified by the impending crisis that we're grasping at straws, all equally blinded by fear? Am I seeing it the way I do because that's what tickles my idiosyncratic fancy? Are we all so terrified by the impending crisis that we're grasping at straws, all equally blinded by fear?

"What makes you think the Inst.i.tute's not what it seems?" was all she dared say.

"Once we deepened our own background check, I could see why Dr. Goldfarb was so offended by the fact that Morgan Miller put Ahasuerus and the Algenists on the same list. Adam Zimmerman's grandparents emigrated to the States in the 1930s, fleeing Hitler's persecution of the Jews. The Foundation's mission statement contains some very strong injunctions against releasing results that might be useful for military purposes or for political oppression. The Algenists' website makes similar protestations, but if you look back in time far enough, it becomes fairly obvious that algeny's intellectual forebears were firmly in the n.a.z.i camp. The parent Inst.i.tute of Algeny in Leipzig was previously a branch of the German Vril Society, which claimed descent-falsely, one presumes, but no less significantly-from the Bavarian Illuminati. There are similarly remote historical links to Theosophy, the racial theories of Count Gobineau, and something called the World Ice Theory. Does any of that ring a bell with you?"

"No," Lisa confessed.

"Nor to anyone else alive and sane, I suspect. Apparently, there's more than a linguistic a.n.a.logy connecting algeny to alchemy. Vril was an occult force invented by some nineteenth-century British novelist; it was enthusiastically taken up by a number of continental occultists. Nowadays, although its current mission statements still refer in approving terms to Nietzschean moral reconstruction, contemporary algeny has cleaned up its intellectual act considerably, but if Miller bothered to do any digging, his investigations would have revealed the rotten core beneath the s.h.i.+ny surface."

Lisa had no idea of what to make of all this. It sounded almost surreal, and completely irrelevant-but she reminded herself that her own far more modest inferences had sounded equally irrelevant to Smith. "If they really are crackpots from way back when," she said warily, "where does their money come from?"

"Switzerland," was the terse reply.

Switzerland had long been a world leader in the arcane art of money laundering-which grew more arcane with every year that pa.s.sed. Ordinarily, "money from Switzerland" was a euphemism for the "Mafia," which had controlled up to fifty percent of GDP in the post-Communist nations at the turn of the century. During the last thirty years, following the example set by the organizations on which they were modeled, much of that wealth had been rechanneled into legitimate businesses, and the organizations had revamped their image considerably. Some had remarketed themselves as a new breed of revolutionary communists-hence the term "Leninist Mafia"-who were deeply and sincerely concerned with issues of social and economic reorganization. Despite their much-publicized opposition to "Imperialist Global Parasitism," the Leninist Mafia did not seem to have fared any worse during the worldwide economic upheavals of '25 than its alleged counterparts in China.

"So now you think they're gangsters pretending to be crackpots," Lisa said skeptically. "And you think they kidnapped Morgan because they got the same impression as Goldfarb-that he was deliberately underselling whatever it was he had."

"It's a possibility," Smith said defensively. "There's also the apocalyptic angle to consider. You said this Leland character inferred from what the women told you that they were apocalyptic cultists. Did he have any particular group in mind?"

"No," Lisa said. "Do you?"

"The women didn't mention the Ice Age Elite by any chance?"

"That's just post-Millennial folklore," Lisa said. "The Real Woman started sounding off about the Secret Masters and the seeds of a New Order, but those were the only phrases she used."

Lisa remembered talk of the Ice Age Elite being bandied about during her years as a research student, but she couldn't remember Morgan Miller ever having dignified their existence with an opinion. When the years 1999 and 2000 had come and gone, everyone gifted with common sense had expected Millenarian cults to wither away, or at least to be effectively mothballed until 2029 or 2033, the two dates most widely touted as the two-thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion. Ever perverse, however, several of the most vocal cults had refused to go away, and their tales of impending woe had grown ever more fanciful. One such tale had fixated on the anxieties expressed by some scientists that global warming might subvert the ocean-circulation mechanism sustaining the gulf stream, abruptly precipitating a new Ice Age.

The contemporary myth of the Secret Masters hadn't really come into its own until the crash of '25, but earlier versions had been around long before that, and one of its earliest twenty-first-century manifestations had been the idea that the greenhouse effect was being deliberately stimulated, with the intention of causing an Ice Age. The Ice Age Elite were the plotters allegedly responsible for this scheme. They were said to have made elaborate plans to survive the ecocatastrophe in comfort. Accounts of their motives were widely various, ranging from the suggestion that they were Gaean altruists determined to save Mother Earth from further rape, to the proposition that they intended to buy up all the ruined real estate in the northern hemisphere, whose overlords they would become when they eventually unleashed the biotech that would end the Ice Age as abruptly as it had begun. Little had been heard of the Ice Age Elite since 2025, presumably because the Cabal was now widely believed to be in the process of achieving their alleged aims without having had to go to the trouble of precipitating an Ice Age.

"The problem with folklore," Smith told her, "is that it wouldn't qualify as folklore if there weren't people who believe it. Admittedly, Ahasuerus isn't called Ahasuerus because its founder believed in the myth of the Wandering Jew in any simple sense-in fact, if the rumors of his present whereabouts can be trusted, he'd be more accurately considered to be the ultimate Sedentary Jew-but the Inst.i.tute of Algeny is different. It wasn't set up from scratch, so it still carries a certain amount of ideological baggage left over from who knows when. Its interest in future human evolution is closely linked to ideas of apocalyptic notions of destruction and transformation. You say that this Real Woman used the words 'New Order'?"

"Yes," Lisa admitted, "but it's a perfectly commonplace phrase."

"Maybe it is," Smith agreed, "but the Real Women were great enthusiasts for physical culture, weren't they? Very militant too, I believe."

"They weren't n.a.z.is," Lisa said firmly. "I think you might be letting your imagination run away with you."

Smith obviously resented that comment, perhaps because it had a little too much accuracy in it for comfort. "Why did Leland take you along with the two women?" he asked sharply. "Even if it hadn't been obvious that you weren't one of them, he had only to glance at your ID. Why didn't he leave you behind with Ginny and me, to sleep it off in the parking lot?"

"I think he wanted to explain himself," Lisa told him judiciously. "He wanted a quick word with the ambushers before turning them in, but he didn't want us to think they might have been spirited away by their friends. He doesn't want us chasing after him with the same fervor we're devoting to the task of trying to find Morgan Miller. He'd rather we thought of him as an ally. He took me with him so I could bear witness to his good intentions. He might, of course, have fed me a complete pack of lies."

"But you think he was on the level-or as near to it as a man of his type ever is?"

"Probably," Lisa admitted, thinking that Smith was a pompous fool whose att.i.tudes, instincts, and modes of expression were so twentieth-century as to be almost beyond belief. "While we're still searching for Morgan, we can use all the help we can get, and whoever he's working for, Leland does seem to be running a parallel investigation. If I'm right and this whole thing is some kind of silly mistake, it probably won't matter who he reports to."

"And if you're wrong?"

Lisa looked away, feebly pretending that the view from the window had attracted her attention. The helicopter had already begun its descent and the lights of Swindon were displayed beneath her, their brightness and variety testifying that the town was booming, as it had been for half a century. It had owed its first spurt of growth to the fact that it was the halfway point between the original termini of the Great Western Railway, and it advertised itself nowadays as the bridge between the two great cityplexes of England-a claim that excited a certain amount of resentment and scorn in the Birmingham metropolitan area and United Manchester. At the moment, it looked more like an island than a bridge; the threads of illumination connecting it to Chippenham and Reading seemed as frail as spidersilk in comparison to the blaze emitted by the glittering hub where the leisure spots of the town's twenty-four-hour society were cl.u.s.tered. Lisa blinked her eyes, fighting tiredness.

"If I'm wrong," she said, as much to herself as to Peter Smith, "and Morgan really has stumbled onto the kind of technology that can create some kind of a New Order-without bothering to tell me about it-the government doesn't stand much chance of keeping it secret from anyone Leland might be working for, although the reverse might be a different matter. I still think the Ice Age Elite is a silly myth, but if there really are people in the world who are anxious to set themselves up as inheritors of post-Crisis Earth, our job is to make sure they don't get away with it, whoever they are. Isn't it?"

"Of course it is," Smith answered-as he would surely have done even if he hadn't been under the a.s.sumption that Leland had planted camouflaged bugs in Lisa's clothing. He was, after all, a loyal servant of king and country. If he couldn't be trusted to put matters of duty above personal considerations, who could?

SIXTEEN.

There was a uniformed policeman waiting for them at the helipad. As soon as Smith descended from the craft, the man handed him a plastic bag, which he immediately pa.s.sed on to Lisa.

"Change in the helicopter," he commanded. "Put your belt and wrist.w.a.tch in with the old clothes." Lisa hesitated, wondering whether to raise an objection, but Smith was right. If Leland had planted anything, it was as likely to be in her belt or watch as in Jeff 's s.h.i.+rt and trousers. If she had to be phoneless for a while, she had to be phoneless. She moved back to the second rank of seats so that she'd be s.h.i.+elded by the first, although she felt slightly shamed by her obsolete modesty.

It wasn't the first time she had ever put on one of the new garments, but she had found the previous tentative trial so uncomfortable that she had decided to stick with her "dead clothes" for a while longer. Now she wondered why she had reacted so negatively. Was she as much of a dinosaur as Peter Grimmett Smith? Of course not. She was a scientist, supposedly immune to the reflexive "yuck factor" that governed initial reactions to so many new biotechnologies. In a sense, her own response had had an opposite cause; she had always thought of the new fabrics in terms of "fas.h.i.+on," because that was the lexicon the advertisers had used in order to push it, and she had always resisted the idea of being a slave to fas.h.i.+on, valuing newness for its own sake. Now, if the suspicions raised by Smith's clumsy inquiries could be trusted, the advertising lexicon was about to undergo an abrupt change.

What Arachne West had told Lisa on the occasion of their first meeting didn't seem quite as paranoid now as it had then. Now it was perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain that the new global culture was a plague culture, and that smart clothing would soon have to be seen in terms of personal defense-not antibody packaging in the traditional sense, but in a significant new sense. Soon enough the first questions anyone would ask salespeople about the clothes on their racks would concern the quality of their built-in immune systems and the rapidity with which they could react to any dangerous invasion of the commensal bodies within their loving embrace.

The garment Lisa was struggling into wasn't uncomfortable in the sense that ill-fitting clothes could be-although the way it hugged her flesh so cloyingly was slightly disconcerting-but it was worn without underwear and followed the contours of her body so carefully that she felt unusually exposed. exposed. She hesitated before dropping her belt into the plastic bag along with the clothes she had discarded, eventually retrieving her personal smartcards and tucking them into one of the pockets of her new suit. The smartcards ought to be clean, she reasoned, and it was one thing to be phoneless, another to be keyless and creditless. She hesitated before dropping her belt into the plastic bag along with the clothes she had discarded, eventually retrieving her personal smartcards and tucking them into one of the pockets of her new suit. The smartcards ought to be clean, she reasoned, and it was one thing to be phoneless, another to be keyless and creditless.

Ginny reentered the copter just as Lisa finally let the belt drop in the bag. There was a conspiratorial gleam in the younger woman's eye. She extended a gloved hand over the back of the front pa.s.senger seat, opening the palm to display two small white tablets. Lisa met her gaze suspiciously.

"It's going to be a long night, Dr. Friemann," Ginny said. "You need to stay alert." Her free hand also came into view, clutching a plastic bottle filled with turbid fluid. "Fortified GM fruit juice," she explained. "Calories, vitamins, ions ... everything you could possibly need. The boss told me to give it to you." Plainly, the boss hadn't mentioned the side order of pep pills.

If only, Lisa thought as the comment about everything she could possibly need echoed in her skull-but she accepted the pills into her right hand and took the bottle in her left. She swallowed the pills and washed them down thoroughly.

"Keep it," Ginny said. "Drink the rest on the way."

Lisa nodded and followed the pilot out of the helicopter. She handed the plastic bag to the policeman who'd met them. "Better have them swept," she said. "Tell the lab to be careful not to damage the goods-if the equipment is state of the art, it'll probably come in handy. Send the proceeds back to the East Central Police Station."

The officer nodded.

"The next generation of suitskins will probably have sweepers built in," Ginny observed as she slammed the helicopter door. "The police will have to adopt smartfiber uniforms then."

Lisa hadn't heard the term "suitskin" before. She'd only heard smartfiber ensembles called "smartsuits." She had to admit, though, that the one-piece she was now wearing did feel rather like a second skin. As the fibers of such garments acc.u.mulated more faculties, their quasisymbiotic relations.h.i.+p with the body's own outer layer would become increasingly intimate as well as increasingly complex. The suits currently used to hook up to virtual-reality apparatus were much bulkier, restricted in their use to dedicated s.p.a.ces, but the gap between organic and inorganic microtechnology was closing all the time.

Sometime within the next fifty years, it would be possible to talk of nanotechnology as having arrived rather than merely antic.i.p.ated, and the bridges between the organic and the inorganic would be mult.i.tudinous. Even the best suitskins imaginable would be external technology, though: overcoats for ordinary people. Even gut-based nanotech would be external in a technical rather than in a topological sense. One day, if Algenists and other champions of evolution toward the superhuman got their way, none of it would be necessary. True overpeople presumably wouldn't need overcoats to protect them, not from the elements or from all the hostile viruses that bio-armorers could devise.

"That's better," Smith said as she joined him in the elevator that would take them down to ground level. Lisa had already noted that however smart the fibers of her new suit might be, it was perfectly staid in cut and color. It hugged her figure tightly on the inside, but on the outside, it was shaped like a conventional jacket and trousers, and she didn't suppose that its almost-black color would look significantly brighter in daylight than it did beneath the soft yellow lights of the elevator cab.

A patrol car was waiting for them. The driver switched his blue flashers on before setting forth into the traffic, but it didn't accelerate their progress to any noticeable degree. The city streets were surprisingly busy, and the drivers of the other vehicles evidently didn't feel under any obligation to get out of the way. Their onboard computers would be storing up instances of "contributory negligence" with the usual alacrity, but n.o.body seemed to care anymore. The improvements in road safety wrought by the '38 Road Traffic Act had proved as temporary as the achievements of all its predecessors.

Lisa finished off the dregs of the drink Ginny had given her. It had taken the edge off her appet.i.te, but the pills hadn't kicked in yet and she was still engaged in a constant struggle to remain fully alert.

Unlike the Ahasuerus Foundation, the Inst.i.tute of Algeny had not leased office s.p.a.ce in an ultramodern building. Its governors had gone to the opposite extreme, buying a house in an upmarket residential area-which still looked like the private houses that surrounded it. The fact that its walls and gates were topped by razor wire didn't seem at all unusual, given the similar levels of paranoia manifest by its neighbors. The tree-lined street in which it was located was obviously home to people who valued their privacy and took the business of property protection very seriously indeed.

After being admitted to the house, Smith and Lisa were ushered into a room that could have pa.s.sed for an ordinary suburban living room had it been equipped with a homestation, although the mock-antique furniture was the kind usually advertised on the shopping channels alongside discreetly cabineted, twentieth-century TV sets. It wasn't until they were seated that their host introduced himself.

"Matthias Geyer," he said. "Delighted to meet you, Dr. Friemann. There are Friemanns in my family-perhaps we might be distantly related." His accent was smooth and melodious, but quite distinct and deliberate.

"I doubt it," Lisa said.

"But the ancestor who bequeathed the name to you never bothered to Anglicize it," Geyer pointed out. Lisa wondered whether he was trying to recruit her as a potential ally, or making a point for Peter Grimmett Smith's benefit.

"No," she admitted. "He never did."

Matthias Geyer was taller and slimmer than Dr. Goldfarb, but he wasn't as tall or as angular as Peter Grimmett Smith. He was better looking and seemed considerably younger than either of them, although Lisa thought she detected signs of cosmetic somatic engineering on his cheeks and neck. If so, he was probably a forty-year-old determined to preserve the appearance of his twenty-five-year-old peak rather than a thirty-year-old devoted to clean living. He offered his guests a drink, and when they declined, he suggested that they might like something to eat, given that they must have missed dinner. When they declined that offer too, he bowed politely in recognition of their sense of urgency.

"I'm very sorry to hear that misfortune has visited Professor Miller," he said, now addressing himself-with what must have been calculated belatedness-to Peter Grimmett Smith. "I will, of course, do anything I can to a.s.sist his safe recovery. I would be devastated to think that his contact with our organization had anything to do with his disappearance."

"But you do recognize the possibility?" Smith said swiftly.

"I fear so. What he told me was inexplicit, but he was clearly attempting to use an element of mystery to engage my interest. I could not say that he was dangling temptation before me, but he did go to some length to hint that when he spoke of negative results and blind alleys, he was not telling the whole story."

"And that's what you reported back to Leipzig, is it?" Smith asked.

"I am not required to report back to anyone," Geyer informed them loftily. "I make my own decisions. Ours is not a centralized organization, like the Ahasuerus Foundation. Nor has it any princ.i.p.al base in Germany. We have come a long way from our roots, Mr. Smith-in every way."

Lisa wondered whether Geyer knew what they had been talking about in the helicopter. Even if there had been no other bug but Leland's, it was possible that Leland was working for, or with, Geyer-but Geyer's defensiveness was natural enough. He must have known that Smith would have made a comprehensive background check on his organization, and what it would have revealed.

"What was it that Miller was trying to sell you?" Smith asked, unwilling for the moment to be sidetracked into a discussion of the Inst.i.tute's shady origins.

"He made it perfectly clear that he was not trying to sell sell me anything," Geyer corrected him. "He wanted to make a gift, of results acc.u.mulated over four decades, concerning a series of experiments he had conducted on mice and other animals." me anything," Geyer corrected him. "He wanted to make a gift, of results acc.u.mulated over four decades, concerning a series of experiments he had conducted on mice and other animals."

"What other animals?" Lisa was quick to put in. n.o.body else had mentipned other animals, and it was a long time since Miller had been involved with the creation of transgenic rabbits and sheep.

"Dogs, I believe," Geyer replied.

"Dogs?" Lisa echoed skeptically. "The university hasn't used dogs as experimental animals since the 2010 riot."

"What kind kind of experiments?" Smith asked, impatient with what seemed to him to be an irrelevant digression. of experiments?" Smith asked, impatient with what seemed to him to be an irrelevant digression.

"Professor Miller was calculatedly vague," Geyer said apologetically. "He was insistent, however, that the work had a direct bearing on our core endeavors. He expressed concern that if our researchers did not know what he had tried to do and failed, they might waste years of effort following the same sterile path. It had once seemed such a promising line of research, he said, but had disappointed him grievously-and by virtue of its time-consuming nature, he could no longer carry it forward himself."

"Time-consuming nature?" Smith queried.

Geyer raised his hands helplessly. "Given that he also contacted the Ahasuerus Foundation," he said, "I could hardly help drawing the inference that he was speaking of a technology that would permit the extension of life, but he did not say so in so many words."

"But that is is one of your so-called core concerns, isn't it?" Smith's suspicion that Geyer was being evasive was painfully obvious. one of your so-called core concerns, isn't it?" Smith's suspicion that Geyer was being evasive was painfully obvious.

"One of them," Geyer readily conceded. "The founder of the Ahasuerus Foundation was rather narrowly interested in the possibility of human longevity, apparently a.s.suming that human nature could be changed in that single respect without unduly affecting its other components. We have always taken the view that a more general transformation is desirable, of which longevity would not necessarily be the most important aspect."

"You're more interested in breeding a master race than in simply helping everyone to live longer," Smith said, not bothering to employ the kind of inflection that would have turned it into a rhetorical question.

Geyer's expression hardly changed, but Lisa put that down to stern self-control in the face of naked offensiveness. The pills were taking effect now, and she felt a certain tautness and tone returning to the muscles of her limbs and face. She hoped that the dose wouldn't prove too great. She needed to have her wits about her; it wouldn't do any good to be wide awake but too wired to maintain a proper balance.

"If you'll forgive me saying so, Mr. Smith," Geyer said smoothly, "that's the kind of observation one never hears anymore outside of England. Here, as in Germany, there is hardly anyone now alive who first learned to understand the world while Adolf Hitler was still in power. In four years' time, a whole century will have elapsed since the end of World War Two. It's time to put away the old insults, don't you think? The purpose of the Inst.i.tute of Algeny is to fund research in biotechnology that will a.s.sist the cause of human evolution."