Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

by Jack L. Chalker

The place was like a dormitory. The ground floor had a lobby with computer screens giving general information, including schedule changes and even sports scores. A pair of double doors led to a common dining hall. Apparently the residents of the building ate here, caféteria-style, although the food was certainly prepared elsewhere. There wasn’t much room for a kitchen.

  Doors on either side led to communal stores. There was a small pharmacy, a tailor, a shoe shop, and the like. Apparently they were only open one hour on each side of each shift change. They also couldn’t be very large, I told myself, as it wouldn’t be efficient to have actual stores in each building unit. Each was staffed by one clerk, who simply took in what you had—shoes to be fixed, for example, or an order for toiletries and such—then sent them to a central store which had the shoes fixed or filled the order. What you wanted was ready when you came back from a shift. Not a bad system. If it wasn’t for TMS I might actually be impressed by this place, I told myself.

  There was a small elevator cage at each end of the hall, too, I noticed, so I would not have to climb the stairs.

  My instructions said I was to report first to T-26, Room 404—which, I assumed, was on the fourth floor—and get settled. I would be contacted there and told where to go and what to do next.

  Room 404 was where it should logically have been. Since there was no key, only a card slot, I inserted my card and the door slid open.

  It was a small room, about five meters by four, but it had been sensibly laid out by somebody who’d obviously done hotel work. The two beds looked comfortable and standard—after the cell and then those barracks cots they looked wonderful—and there were two reasonably spacious closets, plenty of drawers along the wall opposite the beds, and a CRT terminal that was unfamiliar in design but pretty easy to figure out.

  A side door led to a toilet, shower, and basin, which, I saw, we shared with the room next to us. I say “we” simply because when I looked in the closets, then in the drawers, somebody’s stuff was already in them. The owner didn’t appear to be much bigger than I from the size of the clothes, but I’d have to wait and see.

  Although the room monitors were cleverly concealed to blend in with the surroundings, they weren’t hard to locate. The one in the bathroom was in the center of the overhead light, and the one in the main room was almost certainly integrated into the centrally located smoke and fire detector. I wondered idly if they had the closets covered. Though the idea seemed pretty ridiculous they probably did. Ypsir and his TMS apparently had that kind of mind.

  I checked the computer terminal for messages but there were none apparent. I didn’t yet have the codes needed to call up the less routine stuff. Since I had received no instructions beyond coming here and waiting, I put my stuff away in an empty drawer and stowed the overnight bag in one of the closets, then went back to the terminal and gave it a good going-over. It was extremely primitive by my standards, but did have the basics, both keyboard and voxcoder for two-way communication. The thing was a combination terminal and telephone, possibly even a picturephone. Considering the obvious technical limitations the Confederacy imposed on the Warden Diamond, this really was a slick piece of home-grown work. After deciding I didn’t have the proper tools to disassemble the frame and see what really made the machine tick, I abandoned it for the time being, walked over to the bed, leaned back, and relaxed in the nice, downy softness. I promptly fell asleep.

  I was awakened perhaps two hours later by the sound of the door whooshing back to admit someone. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor and all that, I remained motionless, curious to see who it might be. My eyes opened wide and I sat straight up when I saw the newcomer. I really hadn’t been prepared for this.

  “Oh, hello!” she said, spotting me. “You must be Tarin Bul.”

  The girl was very young—I couldn’t really tell how young—quite small and slightly built, hair cropped as short as my own. I was still sitting up in bed, staring, mouth agape, trying to adjust to the fact that she was a she, when she started removing her uniform.

  “Hey!” I cried out, feeling very awkward indeed. I was no prude, but societies have rules and the one I came from wasn’t quite this casual.

  She stopped, a little puzzled. “What’s the matter?” And she meant it.

  “Um—you’re taking off your clothes in front of a perfect stranger.”

  The idea struck her as funny. “Oh, you’re supposed to take yours off, too. The Monitor should have told you. I guess somebody’s asleep at the switch today.” She finished removing the last of her clothing, which she folded into a small ball, then opened a drawer, from which she removed a plastic bag, stuffing in the clothes. “Below Supervisor grade it’s not permitted to wear uniforms in your home dorm. Don’t you know that?”

  I shook my head slowly, trying to decide if I was being put on. My wits returning, I realized that what she was telling me made perfect sense from the TMS viewpoint. You couldn’t carry in anything without taking it out of your clothing first, and being totally nude was the ultimate invasion of privacy, somehow. Now, I’d gone nude in mixed company many times, usually on plush resort worlds with seaside villas, and never thought anything of it. But this was a whole different kind of experience, and it took some getting used to.

  She held out the bag. “Come on—before the Monitor sees you. Off and in the bag.”

  I sighed and decided that it wouldn’t be in character if I caved in too easily. “But—you’re a girl!” I was suddenly very cautious, mentally. The mere fact that I hadn’t been called on such a rule indicated to me that they were observing my behavior and how I acclimated socially. The fact that I was fourteen was some protection, but it wasn’t total. I had to assume that any government capable of putting a superhuman robot in the most secret rooms of Military Systems Command could easily know about the Merton Process and deduce the truth given half a chance. She stood up straight and shook her head at me in wonder. “Are all people Outside so shy and upset by so simple a thing?”

  Her question told me two facts straight off, if she was indeed what she seemed. First, she was a native of this world, and, second, I was the first person from “Outside”—that is, outside the Warden Diamond, and maybe even outside of Medusa—she’d ever met. Ordinarily such knowledge would give me some advantage and leeway in slips, but I couldn’t assume that whoever was monitoring me was as inexperienced or naive.

  I sighed, gave in, and removed my clothes, tossing them into the common bag. She tied the bag off and left it on the floor. “I’m Ching Lu Kor,” she introduced herself. “Ah—you are Tarin Bul?”

  I nodded nervously. “Uh huh.”

  She looked me over mock-critically. “You’re not so bad. I always heard people Outside were all soft and flabby, but you look pretty good.”

  I shuffled nervously, creating my proper persona as I went. “Uh—I haven’t had a lot of exercise in a while, but I made do.”

  She sat down on the corner of the bed opposite mine.

  “What’d you do to get sent here? Or shouldn’t I ask that?”

  I shrugged and sat back on my bed. “I executed the murderer of my father,” I told her. “Nobody else would.”

  She frowned and appeared to be a little taken aback by that. Clearly a crime of that magnitude was hard for someone brought up in a totalitarian world like Medusa to fathom. But clearly she understood the implications of the act, even if it seemed impossible to her. She even seemed impressed. A romantic, I decided.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked suddenly, getting away from the subject. “I’m starved—I’ve just come off shift. You’re lucky—no work until 1600 tomorrow.” She jumped up from the bed. “Come on. We have to drop off the laundry anyway. Then you can tell me all about Outside, and I can tell you all about here.”

  That seemed a fair trade, but I decided some hesitation was in order. “We go eat—like this?”

  She laughed. “You really are hung up, aren’t you? They’ll have a psych on you if y
ou don’t relax a little.” She turned and waved at the room. “Besides, somebody’s always looking at you anyway. What’s the difference?”

  She had a point there. I let her pick up the clothes bag and followed her out the door, then stopped. “Hey—what about the cards?”

  Obviously I had said something funny again. “You don’t need cards in your own home,” she responded as she headed for the stairs.

  She was certainly right about nudity. Old, young, male, female—everyone walked about and sat and talked with no inhibitions at all. Here and there would be people in uniform, either somebody with rank who wanted everybody else to remember it or those still coming in from work or leaving for it. Apparently there were staggered start times for the shifts within the two-hour active period, probably to ease the mass-transit load.

  The caféteria was about half full, with the usual eating-place bustle and unintelligible mass-conversation buzz. There were no menu choices, I found—you went up, punched a button, got a covered tray, then went to a table and sat down. Water and a selection of three beverages at a self-service area in the center of the caféteria provided the only option.

  The food was unfamiliar but tasted pretty good. I was never very fussy about food and was certainly no gourmet, so I adjusted to this as easily as if I’d eaten the stuff all my life. After the jail mush and blocky slop of the reception center it was a real pleasure to have a recognizable plate with entrée, vegetables, and dessert. The meat seemed a standard synthetic, but the fruit and vegetable appeared fresh. I remembered that Medusa imported a fair amount of food from the warmer worlds category. Keep the masses happy, I thought, even if they can eat tree bark.

  I was struck by a number of things as I sat there eating, including at least one. fact that amazed me. Here were these people in the most totalitarian society I’d ever known or experienced, and they were sitting back, relaxed, talking, looking, and sounding for all the world like any caféteria crowd anyplace—except, of course, for then: bare hides. Far from making me relax more about Medusa, the observation that here was a totalitarian society that worked—worked so well that the generations born and raised into it felt completely at ease—made me nervous. I had to admit that Talant Ypsir might be an unpleasant individual, but he was damned smart.

  My other observations were on the more practical side. Medusans looked about as human as anybody else, particularly a frontier world population. Yet subtle differences that might otherwise go unnoticed were immediately apparent to an Outsider such as myself. The skin textures seemed far more leathery, somehow; the hair was also far stiffer, wiry. Even the eyes seemed somehow different, almost as if shaped by a master sculptor out of marble, without the shine and liquidity of human eyes.

  I knew that I, too, now shared these characteristics, yet I felt perfectly normal, not in the least bit changed. My skin had the same look as the skin of those around me, yet it felt normal, soft, and natural to me.

  A third observation was that I was the youngest-looking person in the caféteria, although several very young people were there. Well, nothing to do but get to know my roommate a bit more. She certainly seemed anxious to get to know me.

  “How old are you?” she asked. “They told me you were young, but I figured you’d be my age.”

  My eyebrows rose. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen two weeks ago,” she told me proudly. “That’s when I started work here.”

  “Well, I’m close to fifteen,” I answered her initial question, stretching the truth a bit. There’s far less of a gap between fifteen and sixteen than between fourteen and sixteen. I wanted to press a bit further on her comment, though. “Who told you about me? And how come you and me are together here?”

  She sighed. “They really didn’t tell you anything, did they? Okay, three weeks ago I was just graduated and still in Huang Bay—that’s way south of here—with my family. I knew I was going to get assigned soon, though, and, sure enough, my orders came through. I was inducted into the Transport Guild and sent here to start work. About a week ago I was called down to the Supervisor’s office and told that I was being paired with one Tarin Bul, a young man sent here from Outside, and that the two of us would work as a pair thereafter. They also told me you’d have some ideas and ways I might find strange—and that’s certainly true. In fact, all this is still a little strange to me, although it’s the same kind of setup I grew up in. My assignment’s inside, though, and away from the water.”

  “Huang Bay’s on the equator, then?” I knew where it was exactly thanks to the handy map in my head, but it was a logical question.

  She nodded. “Nearly, anyway. It’s a lot prettier than here, with all sorts of flowers and trees. Not that this is really bad, though. No animal or insect problems, and the fruit’s fresher.” She paused a moment. “Still, I kind of miss home and family and all that.”

  I understood perfectly. Although I’d never been raised in any sort of family atmosphere, or had any close personal attachments, I could well see how someone who had been would be very lonely and homesick in this situation. That she accepted the wrench in her life so unquestioningly, said something important about the society. That wrench also explained why she was glad to see me.

  We put our trays in the disposal, dropped the laundry by the small window that now had a uniformed attendant, then went back upstairs. We would see the rest of the place later; now it was time to get to know each other better, and for me to start learning the rules.

  Apparently once the .door was activated by a card the first time it opened when it recognized you, because the room door slid back and we walked in. First Ching checked the room terminal, then, finding it still blank, sank back down on the bed and looked at me. It was far too soon for me to do anything but sit on the other. I didn’t wait for an opening, though.

  “You said downstairs that we were paired—does that mean what I think it does?” I asked her.

  “Depends on what you think it means. Everybody’s paired who hasn’t started or joined a family group. From here on in, we do everything together. Eat, sleep, go out, work—even our cards have identical account codes, so we can spend each other’s money.”

  I gave a wan smile. “What if we don’t get along?”

  “Oh, we will. The State ran us through a lot of checks with their big computers and came up with us. The State doesn’t make mistakes.”

  I certainly hoped that wasn’t true; frankly, I knew it wasn’t. But what the hell. “That might be true for native-born Medusans, but they can’t know as much about me as they do about somebody born and raised here.” And how! At least—I hoped not.

  She seemed upset. “You mean you don’t like me?”

  “Now, I didn’t say that. I think I could learn to like you a lot, but I don’t really know you yet, and you don’t know me. And I don’t know Medusa at all—which should be obvious.”

  My seeming honesty calmed her a little. “I guess you’re right. But there’s so little to know about Medusa.”

  “That’s only because .you were born and raised here. What you take for granted I don’t recognize at all. This pairing, for example—is it always a girl and a boy?”

  My question got her giggling a bit again. “That’s silly. You put any two in a pair and one of ‘em’s gonna be a girl.”

  “How’s that?” Now I was genuinely confused. There was something here I was missing, and it was tough to find.

  She sighed and tried to summon patience without sounding patronizing, but she didn’t quite make it. “I still don’t see what your problem is. I mean, I was a boy once myself and it was no big thing.”

  “What!” But with my surprise came the dawn, and with a lot more gingerly asked half-questions I managed to find the key. The key was the basic Warden precept on Medusa: survival.

  Unlike the rest of the Warden Diamond, on Medusa the Warden organism was not all-pervasive. It depended upon the living creatures, plant and animal, of Medusa for its survival. On places like Lilith
and Charon the little buggers were in the rocks and trees and everything, but here they concentrated only on animal life forms—and they changed those life forms to insure their own survival. That meant Wardens couldn’t reproduce beyond their host’s capacity without deforming that host and making the host less likely to survive in general. Thus, there was a premium on making certain that the bisexual humans—and animals, too, it seemed—reproduced as well.

  Children were born basically neuter, although physiologically they would be classed as female, I suppose. When puberty hit, between ten and thirteen years of age, they acquired sexual characteristics based on the group with which they lived and with whom they most frequently associated. The vast majority, perhaps seventy-five percent, of the people of Medusa were female since you needed more females than males to assure regular reproduction.

  Frankly, I hadn’t been out in Medusan society enough for this concept to have sunk in, but, thinking back to the groupings on the buses and even in the caféteria, it had seemed that there were an awful lot of women. …

  “Let me get this straight,” I said at last, trying to sort things out. “If we were to, say, join one of these group families, and it already had its share of men, I might change sex?”

  She nodded. “Sure. Happens all the time. Nobody thinks much of it, really.”

  “Well, I do,” I told her. “Everywhere else, even in the Diamond, I’m told, if you’re born male you stay male and if you’re born female you stay female. This system is going to take some getting used to.”

  The sociological implications were staggering, but beyond that it raised a broader question: if the Warden organism could undertake as major a change as that in, apparently, a very short .time, what else could it do? The potential was there for making Medusans totally self-determining malleables—if they could control the Wardens, rather than being controlled by them. If that were somehow possible, you could literally change your appearance by willpower, become anybody—or the semblance of anything—you wanted. I raised the possibility with her.