“Where large numbers of people have identical interests, no conspiracy is needed to make them act in concert,” he replied, taking such evident delight in his cleverness that Lisa almost suspected him of applying a peculiar kind of intellectual algeny, by means of which he was assiduously weaving the residual pleasure of their recent sexual activity into something more purely intellectual. “The victories that feminism has won in the economic arena have not been without their cost, and consciousness-raising works both ways. The same arguments that alerted women to all they had been unjustly denied also alerted men to the fact that they would have to adopt different tactics if they were to ensure that they were to continue to maintain even a fraction of their former advantages. Their strategy was obvious: they had to persuade women to cherish at least a few of the chains of their former bondage. Their greatest victory to date has been the acceptance by so many women that what they reallywanted to advance was the cause of femininity, with all its inherent softness, modesty, and thirst for affection.

“Unfortunately, that has meant that far too many of the young women currently determined to make a career in science embark upon that career without a suitably abrasive attitude of mind. What is worse, many of them flatly refuse to acknowledge the desirabüity of acquiring such an attitude. Many of the best recruits to American science, in consequence, come from the poorer countries, whose citizens all know perfectly well that Ufe is warfare and that the powerless can gain power only by usurping the privileges of the powerful.”

Lisa conceded privately that if there really had been points at stake, Miller would have scored at least nine for technical merit and another eight for artistic impression. She thought she knew him well enough, even on such short acquaintance, to suppose that he not only meant every word of what he said, but also believed she ought to know it too, if she were to be educated in all the fields of his expertise.

All she said in return was: “Isn’t that kind of hard Darwinism deeply unfashionable nowadays?”

“Certainly,” he said. “Especially in America. Creationism is, by contrast, quite fashionable there. Nowhere in the world is the impending end of civilization anticipated with such naked glee, especially among people determined not merely to see their neighbors perish, but to assist them in the perishing.”

“Very masculine, survivalism,” Lisa observed. “Creationism too.”

“Very,” Miller agreed. “Backlashes always tend to the extreme, and to the ridiculous. We shall see a great deal of extremism and absurdity before we die, my darling. We shall see backlashes against backlashes, and a human world drowning in its own uncontrollable adrenaline. We are of the generation that will be privileged to take part in the first lemming year of humankind, no matter how the rags and tatters of femininity may rail against it—but we ourselves do not have to be lemmings, any more than we have to be Calhounian rats or Mouseworld mice. We have the vocation of science to serve our needs. We can be bystanders—not innocent bystanders, I admit, but bystanders nevertheless—provided that we maintain the abrasiveness of our minds and are not so reckless as to give hostages to fortune by having children.”

In subsequent conversations, of which by far the majority were held in less comfortable arenas, Lisa heard Morgan Miller’s prognosis of the current crisis in human affairs at much greater length, and in infinitely finer detail. She listened to his rhapsodic analyses of the possible scope of the imaginary art of algeny. She bore witness to his careful sifting of the aphoristic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. She patiently tolerated his speculative investigations of the strategy and tactics of the biological warfare that would supply the means by which World Wars Three and Four were bound to be fought. She helped him to discover and expand the unique pathology of his peculiar Cassandra Complex.

Lisa had always thought herself to be the last person in the world to resent the lack of romance in a sexual relationship, but Morgan Miller certainly tested her limits in that regard. From the very beginning, she regarded him as a challenge to—and perhaps the ultimate test of—her own ideals and principles.

In the beginning, at least, she was proud of the way in which she coped with him. She honestly believed she was adapting him to her own purposes while he was adapting her to his. Theirs, she thought, was an honest contract for the pleasurable use of one another’s sexual parts, and no sort of marriage at all.

Later, she began to doubt herself, and when that happened, she had perforce to doubt him too, but for a year and more she was convinced that the two of them had the whole art and science of human relationships well and truly licked.

She slept with Chan Kwai Keung too, but only twice. It was not that he was in any real danger of falling deeply in love with her, but the intricacy of his mind would not let him treat their sexual intercourse superficially. It made him more introspective and self-doubtful, and that was not the effect Lisa wanted to have. Morgan Miller was by no means incapable of self-doubt, but it required a far more powerful stimulus to bring it out in him.

She never slept with Edgar Burdillon, although she spent almost as much time with him on a day-by-day basis as she did with Morgan, because he had at least as much to teach her about laboratory technique and biomolecular analysis. She found him more comfortable company than Morgan or Chan, and did not want to prejudice that ease of association by undue complication. No matter how abrasive a mind became, it still required comfortable refuges, and Ed Burdillon became one such refuge, all the more valuable to her because it was part and parcel of her working environment.

If she’d had to guess, in the summer of 2003, Lisa would have correctly estimated that Ed Burdillon would one day be head of the department, and that Morgan Miller would still be working alongside him, but she would have taken it for granted that Chan and she would both move on.

If she had been asked, in the summer of 2003, what it would signify if she and Chan were still around in 2041, she would have judged it evidence of failure, indolence, or cowardice.

If she had been invited, in the summer of 2003, to estimate the year in which the world’s population would finally peak and the great collapse would begin, she would probably have said 2040, although she would have hoped secretly that the estimate might be ten or twenty years too early.

Morgan Miller’s lectures on the neoMalthusians were fun—maybe the best fun available to Lisa outside of his bed during the winter of 2002-3, which turned out to be the worst of the zero years—and she actually began to relish the prospect of lending him assistance by supervising the supportive seminars in the following academic year.

Although, Miller, as a confirmed lover of aphorisms, was prepared to borrow telling phrases from the likes of Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin, his actual teaching drew far more heavily on the hard data that had been patiently collated by Claire and W. M. S. Russell in Population Crises and Population Cyclesin order to add statistical detail to their accounts of humankind’s previous flirtations with extreme population density. Each such flirtation had been facilitated by a great leap forward in agricultural science or technologies of irrigation, and each one had its own idiosyncratic features by courtesy of its specific social context, but the raw numbers always told the same story. Case by case, from China and “monsoon Asia” through the Near East and Europe to Mexico and the Andes, Miller followed the Russells’ analyses of the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of the ecological impact of their numbers, bringing all known history and a substantial fraction of prehistory into a single, overarching frame.