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 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”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, 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 Institute 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 youaboard.”