Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

by Jack L. Chalker

  “We have monitors along that whole area under the café”, and in every maintenance room,” the major grumbled, “and we did a total check when it was obvious you could have gone nowhere else. They showed nothing. How is it possible?”

  “One sewer looks exactly like another,” I pointed out, “and most of it is totally uninhabited most of the time. It’s pretty easy to patch in and substitute an old recording of a sewer doing what sewers do.”

  She nodded. “And all the monitors are on one cable down there, to save money. I could make them all independent, which would compound their troubles no end, but that would be a rather obvious ploy.”

  “Not to mention the fact that, unless you did it to the whole city, something that would not only be obvious but would cost a fortune and disrupt the place for months, they could just move to a different sewer. But surely you already knew they were in the sewers.”

  “We did. It is the most logical place, anyway. But any attempt to breach that cable should set up all sorts of flags in Control.”

  “Well, there are two possibilities there. One is that they have somebody in Control who can be at just the right spot to cover up this sort of thing when needed. The second possibility is that you’ve simply been outclassed technically.

  This system of yours is pretty sophisticated, but it would be easy for a Confederacy tech team to beat and you know that better than I do.”

  “Are you suggesting that the Confederacy is behind this group?”

  “It seems likely—but indirectly. Maybe they supply the smarts from someplace like the picket ship or their own satellites, but the people are home-grown. I don’t know—for all their technical wizardry, they seemed to me like kids playing a game, sort of a more dangerous version of trying to beat the automatic doors on the buses and trains. They’re playing at revolution, at least the ones I saw were.”

  Hocrow looked at me strangely for a moment. “Is what you told them about actually being a bred assassin true?”

  “Yeah, it’s true. Big money was paid, too. I was a long-range hidden gun in a power play my father planned. They got the jump on him before he was ready or I was old enough to be a factor, and I admit I was too young—too emotional—then.”

  ‘Then you wouldn’t avenge your father’s death if it happened now?”

  “Oh, sure I would—but I wouldn’t have been caught.”

  She mulled that over, just sitting there, looking up at the ceiling for quite some time. Finally she nodded to herself. “That’s what was bothering me so much about you before. It fits. It explains a lot.” She gave that icy smile again. “It seems you are misplaced. You should be in TMS.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I thought I was. Otherwise, what are we doing here?”

  She sighed. “One thing does bother me. If you have your preliminary training and all that special design, how will we ever know which side you are really on?”

  I chuckled. “No matter what, I have limited experience. If you and your entire staff of monitors, psychs, and the like can’t be sure of me, then your system’s too shaky to have any hope of long-term survival anyway. Either you can do the job or you should give it up.”

  That was blunt, almost daring talk, but it was also guaranteed to play directly to a solid cop’s ego because, frankly, it was true. The fact that I was trained to beat any system didn’t mean I couldn’t be beat. It only meant they had to be up to the job.

  “Now, what about this psych exam?” I asked her. “Can you get me by it?”

  “It should be relatively easy for someone with your supposed abilities,” she mocked. “Still, we can do a little reinforcing before you leave here, with your help. I have a tech on call.”

  “That’ll do,” I told her. “But you’re not going to do anything crazy like pick up any of the café staff, are you? They all have to be in on it, at least in another cell that supports mine. I’d just trail and track ‘em, if possible. My own intention is to make myself invaluable enough to the organization that I’ll be passed ever upward. If everybody’s as amateurish as these people, you have no real problem, only an irritant. So what if they can play games with the system as long as they’re still trapped in it? But if, at the top levels, there’s somebody or some group really able to use what they’ve got, then I want to meet them.”

  She looked at me with those steely eyes. “Why?”

  I grinned. “Because I want your job. Because, maybe, I’d like to be First Minister before I’m forty. Or, maybe, the guy who tells the First Minister what to do.”

  “Ambitious, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “I’m young.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Working Both Sides of the Street

  The psych job was no big problem. In fact, the hardest thing about it was not betraying how much more I knew about the tech’s machines than she did. Still, as someone allegedly under psych probes for over a year after the murder, I could be expected to have a certain amount of familiarity and expertise.

  The routine psych exam was designed to catch problems before they developed into something that might cause real trouble for the Guild and the system. I did learn, by casual conversation while taking the exam, a bit of interesting additional information to file.

  There was no psych school on Medusa; all psychs native to the Warden system were trained on Cerberus. It stood to reason, therefore, that this Opposition might also have Cerberan origins. I had no evidence, of course, but such a level of technological expertise combined with such an amateurish and naive set of people led to the inescapable conclusion that we—the Opposition, that is—were the arm of a widespread, Confederacy-backed underground whose main objective, at least on Medusa, was to get organized and remain in waiting until needed.

  I got along well with the cell members, particularly once I disdained that silly robe, hood, and veil the rest of them used. Hell, they all knew who I was anyway, so why fool with that sort of stuff? To my disappointment, most of them were also in the Transport Guild—I wanted to broaden my base—although at least two were fairly high up. But they were such eager amateurs, that I felt I had to more or less lead them along and also maybe dangle some bait for the higher-ups. Therefore, at one meeting I dropped a real bombshell. They were doing their usual debating-society stuff about the problems in breaking the system as opposed to crawling around in the cracks when I interrupted. “I think I’m pretty clear on how to destroy totally TMS’s hold on Medusa.” All of a sudden you could have heard a pin drop.

  “So? What master plot has the superkid come up with now?” one of them finally asked.

  “Let me tell you about the harrar,” I began. “They’re too big not to eat all the time, and too big and fat ever to catch anything. Yet there are plenty of harrar in the wild. You remember some of the old wives’ tales about them?”

  They nodded and shook their heads and mumbled and finally somebody said, “But nobody believes that crap.”

  “On a world that’s been settled for this short a time, there’s almost always a good reason for those tales,” I pointed out. “And the harrar itself fits in perfectly. They can change shape. They can make themselves look like other, more familiar things and then just sit there until prey comes near. Maybe they even attract it. But they change shape all the same. On a more primitive basis, I think the tubros have a little of this ability as well. They have a tail that looks like their necks with a ball of fat on the end of it. Why? A neck with no head, or a ball of fat, isn’t going to fool any predator worth its. salt. I think they make that ball of fat look just like their pointy heads, when they have to. All of them change color to fit their background, as do almost all the animals on Medusa. Hell, even we do that, sort of.”

  “But that’s animals,” somebody noted. “What’s that to do with us, even if it is true?”

  “I think humans can do it, too. The fact is, the Warden cells that make- up our bodies are basic living cells for plants and animals. They’re not like normal human, plant, or animal c
ells, but they’re more like each other than like normal cells. They protect us from cold and heat and even from starvation, within limits. Given air and water we can live anywhere and on most anything if we had to. Nature is really pretty consistent. Shape-changing is simply a practical survival characteristic the Wardens could develop.”

  “Then why can’t we do it?” somebody wanted to know.

  “Because we don’t know how. I suspect that if we were out in the wild the ability would come more or less naturally. But it does exist, even here. I’ve seen scars heal almost while I was watching them. I’ve seen three people I knew change sex so absolutely you’d swear they were born with that new sex. If we can accomplish something that total, we can surely make changes with any face and form.”

  “That may be,” Sister 657 put in, “but nobody can control these things so it does no one any good.”

  “I think they can be controlled. I think the harrar and the tubros’ tail tell us it’s possible. With them it’s probably instinctive, but the ability is there. It’s only a matter of our finding out how to do it. I’m convinced the government knows. They went to a lot of trouble to suppress any idea that it’s possible because they know it is. Their system is one based on visual and audio surveillance. Anybody who looked and sounded just like somebody else could use the card of whoever they appeared to be. Replace somebody—almost anybody roughly your size—and you can walk where he or she would walk and the monitors would never pick up the substitution. A lot of TMS’s offices, for example, have no monitors themselves. The watchers don’t like to be watched, and they need a few places off the record sometimes. A relatively small group of malleable people could walk into TMS as prisoners and wind up replacing everybody in top authority. A coordinated effort could collapse the system beyond easy repair.”

  “He makes it sound so easy,” our other male member grumbled.

  “No, it’s not easy, and the plan is not without risk. Some people would die. A lot of homework would be necessary to keep detection away as long as possible. But our group has enough people placed in top levels to phony those records now—they’re using the same principle I’m referring to, only in a more limited way. They understand that a totalitarian government is dependent on its technology for its controls and is secure only as long as that technology works and remains in their hands. They’re going slightly nuts just because we beat the system, even though we haven’t done anything threatening to them. Take away their system’s confidence in knowing that the person on their recordings is really that person and you have rabid, absolute paranoia and fear on the part of the leadership. Shake it and it topples. It’s more fragile than you’ve been brought up to think.”

  This set off a furious debate that was ended by Sister 657 with the comment, “All this might be true—if such body control is really possible. And that’s a big if.”

  “I’m not so sure it is,” I replied. “Look, we’re pretty low down on the Opposition chart right now, but somebody up top is very bright and very well placed. If we can get this idea kicked far enough upstairs we might find out for sure. Can you arrange it?”

  “I’ll try,” she assured me, “but I still think it’s nothing but a fairy tale.”

  I had been on Medusa for more than six months when I finally got an answer. I’ll say this for them—whoever was at the top was cautious in the extreme. The information, when it came, was both good and bad at the same time, and not something that could be used immediately.

  Yes, all humans on Medusa were potentially malleable, but in order to accomplish a change, you first almost literally had to develop a sense of the Wardens and their connections, one to another. Once you had this sense—this ability to “talk” to your Wardens—you could, through hypnosis or psych machine, perform what was needed to be performed. The trouble was, nobody had ever found out how you accomplished it. Oh, it was possible, and had been done, but those who could do it could not explain how they did it, or even accurately describe the sensation. Nor had they been able to teach others. And unless you had that “sense of communication,” as they called it, all the hypnos and psych machines in the world couldn’t do a damned thing.

  There was a general feeling that people who had the ability were born with it, at least as a latent ability that could not be learned. The government spent some time looking for those people, spiriting them away to a special compound far from anything and anybody else. They had hoped to breed the ability, but that plan had fallen flat. There were reports that many of the Wild Ones could do it, and often did, but whether this was voluntary or a response to the harsh conditions under which they lived was unknown.

  Stimulus-response, that was the answer; but what stimulated this “sense” into action? Find the stimulus and you had the key—but Opposition sources had failed to find it and hardly believed in it, at least for the record. Still, if either certain social conditions or psychs could induce sex changes, then there had to be a way to induce the rest of it.

  Certainly this same “sense” was responsible for the fabled powers of the leaders of Lilith, although there, too, the power was not for the masses and could not be acquired. You either had it or you didn’t. That thought was depressing, since the same sort of thing might be the case here. Neither I nor anybody I knew might have that ability.

  On Charon and Cerberus, though, everybody had it, at least to a degree. On Charon a person required training; on Cerberus the ability was involuntary, automatic, and universal. The lack of consistency between the three other worlds didn’t help in finding a Medusan key.

  Although I’d been warned about it, I can remember the shock at my first experience with the sex-change business. It wasn’t some gradual thing—one person slowly changing—it was dramatic, taking place entirely in a matter of days. Medusan society was certainly the least sexist in any sense I could remember. Oh, certainly, there was complete sexual equality on the civilized worlds, but the two sexes still were physically different, hormonally different, and it was never really possible for one sex to understand the other totally. Neither sex had ever been the other. On Medusa you could be one or the other, either according to some odd formula the Wardens had or because you wanted to through psych sessions—and that was the key to my theory, the clincher. If something so drastic as sexual change could be induced, any change could be induced, if only you had the key.

  This brought me to the Wild Ones. Nobody really seemed to know much about them except that they had a primitive hunter-gatherer tribal society. There were no romantic legends about them on Medusa; the very thought of living away from power and transportation and automated meals terrified even the bravest Medusan. That was irritating, but understandable. What was less understandable was why the Medusan government allowed Wild Ones at all. They served no apparent purpose, contributed nothing to the society—although, it’s true, they also took nothing from it—and remained a totally uncontrolled, independent element who owned the wilderness portion of the world, and that meant the bulk of it. I knew from bitter experience that totalitarian minds like those of Ypsir and his associates would find the very existence of such bands intolerable. Their psychology simply wouldn’t allow people to remain so free and unfettered for long. Of that I was absolutely certain, unless one of three conditions existed: (1) they performed a useful, valuable, or essential service to the government—highly unlikely; (2) they did not exist—even more unlikely; or, (3) no matter what Medusa could do, they couldn’t catch them.

  And now I had reliable reports from above somewhere that the Wild Ones were reputed shape-changers, that they were at least on equal terms .with the harrar. So, logically, the third choice seemed the most probable. Medusa wanted them, but had been singularly unsuccessful in catching those primitive folk. That conclusion led, too, to the question of just how primitive they might be, but this was something I could only learn by going and seeing for myself. If they were indeed a bunch of tribal types munching roots and grunting, I’d be stuck with them and out of l
uck.

  Right now working both sides of the street had its advantages for me, but that, too, couldn’t last forever. Major Hocrow would keep me going on the leash only as long as I was feeding her information that was either useful or might lead to useful information. If too long a dry spell came along, or if she decided that was all I could get, I knew my future wasn’t too bright no matter what her assertions were as to my ultimate destiny. She was a good agent, with just the right nose for trouble, and she smelled a rat in me.

  On the other hand, no matter how disappointing a debating forum these so-called rebels were, they were scared enough of the Medusan government and TMS to kill at the first sign of a double cross. Since they were such nervous amateurs, it wouldn’t take much to push at least a couple of them over the edge against me. The man in the middle is always living on borrowed time.

  About the only bright spot was that both sides realized I was not sentimental enough for them to use Ching against me. I was really fond of her. As hard as that was to admit, I also had to admit that I was really far more comfortable with her around, even if she was just there, doing something else quietly in the same room, than on the few occasions when I was alone. I liked to think that my feelings were more paternal than anything else. It was deadly for anyone in my line of work to ever form real attachments—and never more so than here and now. I was convinced I was above really needing other people except as tools or means to ends, but I did sort of realize that Ching needed me.