Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

by Jack L. Chalker

  Bogen turned and nodded to the newcomer, then turned back to her. “Recognize this woman?”

  She stared, feeling fear for the first time now. “It—it’s me,” she breathed.

  Her other self reached out and pulled her to her feet with an iron grip. The strength in that one hand was beyond any human. The robot Juna Rhae took the human’s hands and held them in a viselike grip with one hand while the other arm held her firmly around her waist. This hurt too much to be a show. She would never have ordered something like this!

  “We Cerberans,” Bogen said softly, “swap minds, you see.”

  2

  The man reclined on a soft bedlike couch before an instrument-laden cluster in a small inner chamber of the space vehicle; he was wired, through some sort of helmet device, to the instruments around him. He looked tired, disturbed, and anxious.

  “Hold it!” he called out.

  The massive computer all around him seemed to pause for a brief moment “Something wrong?” the computer asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

  He sat up on the recliner. “Let me take a break before starting this next one. I don’t think I can take two right on top of one another right now. Let me walk around, talk to a few people, generally relax, maybe even get some sleep. Then I’ll be ready. The Confederacy is not going to fall if I wait ten or twelve hours.”

  “As you wish,” the computer responded. “However, I do think that time is of the essence. This might be the one that tells us what we need to know.”

  “Maybe,” the man sighed, taking off the helmet. “But we’ve been rotting here the better part of a year with nothing much to do. Another few hours won’t mean anything. We’ll probably need all four anyway, and nobody knows when the next two will come in.”

  “All that you say is logical and true,” the computer admitted. “Still, I cannot help but wonder if your hesitancy is less governed by such practical matters.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “The Lilith account has disturbed you a great deal. I can tell it by your body-function monitors.”

  He sighed. “You’re right. Hell, that was me, remember. Me when I went down, and somebody I hardly knew at all when he reported. It’s kind of a shock to discover that you don’t know yourself at all.”

  “Still, the work must continue,” the computer noted. “You are putting off the Cerberus report because you fear it That is not a healthy situation.”

  “I’ll take it!” he snapped. “Just give me a little breathing room!”

  “As you wish. Shutting down module.”

  The man rose and walked back to his living quarters. He needed some depressant, he told himself. The pills were there, but he rejected them as not what he wanted. Human company. Civilized company from the civilized worlds, from the culture in which he’d been raised. A drink in the picket-ship bar, perhaps. Or two. Or more. And human beings …

  In a system based on perfect order, uniformity, and harmony, the Warden Diamond was an insane asylum. Halden Warden, a Confederacy scout, had discovered the system well over two centuries earlier. Warden himself was a legend for the number of planets he had discovered, but was considered something of a nut, even for the sort of men and women who preferred to spend most of their time alone among uncharted stars. He loved his work, but he considered discovery his function, leaving just about everything else for those who would follow. He paused only long enough to take positions and beam back the information in as terse a form as possible. The trouble was, he was usually so terse people couldn’t figure out what he meant until they got there—and for the Warden Diamond he was in top form.

  His initial signal was a seemingly simple “4AW.” The meaning of this signal was far from simple—it was impossible. It meant a single solar system with four inhabitable worlds, a statistical near impossibility in a galaxy in which only one out of four thousand solar systems contained anything remotely of use. ,It was Warden, though, who had found the impossible and named them. His entire report was pretty characteristic of his worst.

  Charon—looks like Hell.

  Lilith—anything that pretty’s got to have a snake in it.

  Cerberus—looks like a real dog.

  Medusa—anybody who lives here would have to have rocks in his head.

  And that was it That, the coordinates, and the caution “ZZ,” which meant that there was something about the place he didn’t like but that he couldn’t put his finger on. Dangerous—proceed with extreme caution.

  When the first party, armed to the teeth, reached it, they immediately perceived what spooked Warden beyond the existence of the incredible four planets. They seemed to be at right angles to each other around their F-type star.

  It turned out, of course, that this configuration was a freak occurrence—nobody since has seen the Diamond form as perfectly as Warden when he discovered it, and there was really nothing unnatural about such once-in-a-lifetime configurations, but the early name stuck. The Warden Diamond.

  An enormous amount of space junk was in the system—asteroids, comets, you name it, as well as the usual gas giants—but the second through fifth planets were what held everyone spellbound. Each was within the life zone for temperature; all had atmospheres of nitrogen and oxygen, all had water.

  Charon, at 158.551 million kilometers from its sun, was a hot, steamy jungle world with bubbling mud and horrible heat and humidity. The dominant life form seemed to be large reptilian creatures that resembled the smaller dinosaurs. Indeed, the planet did look like some visions of hell.

  Lilith, at 192.355 million kilometers, was an Eden, a warm paradise all over. Heavily forested, and rich in a variety of plant life, the planet was inhabited by insects from very small to tremendous. The fruit proved edible, the grasses versatile, and even the insects were sources of protein. It was a paradise, all right, with nary a snake in sight Yet.

  Cerberus, at 240.161 million kilometers, was colder, harsher, and the strangest of the four. It appeared to be covered by an enormous deep ocean without any land masses. However, the ocean was covered by a dense growth of plants so gigantic they rose more than two or three kilometers from the seabed to the surface and beyond, forming a riot of colors and supporting a surface plant ecosystem growing on the tops of the great plants themselves. You could build cities in those treetops, and, in the temperate zones, live very comfortably from a climate point of view. But with natural resources other than wood so far out of sight as to be unreachable if available at all and with such an odd place for living, the planet was something of a dog as far as possible settlement was concerned.

  Finally there was Medusa, at 307.768 million kilometers, a cold, frozen world dotted with a few forests but covered mostly with tundra and polar ice. The only one of the four with obvious signs of volcanism, it was a hard, harsh land whose only inhabitants seemed to be a mammalian assembly of Wandering herbivores preyed upon by some particularly nasty-looking carnivores. Medusa was ugly, bitter cold, and stark, compared not just to Lilith but to any of the others; the early explorers had to agree that anybody who voluntarily went to such a world to live and work would most likely have rocks in his head.

  The Exploiter Team had chosen Lilith for its main base, naturally, and settled in. Nothing happened for about six months, as they lived and worked and studied under a rigid quarantine, although with their shuttlecraft they had established preliminary camps on the other three worlds as well. They were just beginning to relax when Lilith’s snake struck.

  By the time all their machinery had ceased to function it was already too late. They watched first as the power drained out of all their equipment, then, frantically, as that same equipment and all other offworld artifacts started to break up into so much junk, rotting before their eyes. Within a week there was simply no sign that anything alien to Lilith had ever been there; everything was gone, even their clearings being overgrown with astonishing speed. Soon nothing at all was left—nothing but sixty-two stunned, stark-naked scientists, bewildered
and scared half to death but without even the most elementary equipment to explain to them that they hadn’t all just gone stark staring mad.

  The other worlds, too, had not escaped. All at one point had been on Lilith, and they’d taken the snake back home with them to the other three planets. Finally, using remote probes, the combined scientific studies of a major lab cruiser off the planets found the culprit—an alien organism like nothing else ever seen.

  Submicroscopic, it lived in colonies within the cells. Though not intelligent in any human sense, it did seem to be able to enforce an amazing set of rules on an entire planet, given an incredible capacity for evolving to meet any threat to the ecosystem and subdue it. Living an entire life span in only three to five minutes, its ability to evolve into whatever was necessary to obey its genetic coding—to keep things as they were—was strong. Within six months the organism had evolved enough to take care of the human interlopers, attacking and corroding all non-native materials and permeating and establishing a symbiotic relationship with the humans.

  The other planets, however, held different fates for intruders. Different atmospheric balances, gravitational forces, radiation intensities—all sorts of differences existed on each, so this bug, this submicroscopic life form, could not change those worlds into Lilith. Instead, the organism changed. On Medusa it adapted the host organism to the new environment, striking a balance that way. On Charon and Cerberus it struck a balance within its hosts that was to its liking but which caused bizarre side effects in those hosts.

  Worse, the Warden organism seemed to have some sort of link to the solar system of its origin. Remove someone infected by it and the Warden organism died—and sadly, since the organism had modified every cell of the body to to its own convenience, the host also died, horribly and painfully. Humans could live in the Warden Diamond, even travel in-system, but they could never ever leave.

  Many scientists devoted their lives and careers to the problem, deliberately trapping themselves on the Warden worlds and establishing scientific colonies still run by descendants. But the solution, in the main, defied them—which of course only infuriated them and spurred them on all the more.

  But it was not to be the scientists who would settle the bulk of the Diamond; it was the criminal class. A Utopian system sophisticated enough to maintain a frontier did not want to waste those people who had somehow found and exploited flaws in their system. The cream of the criminal class in a technological society was often the most brilliant and innovative, but such deviates could hardly be allowed in the civilized worlds or even tolerated for long on the frontier. Until the discovery of the Warden Diamond, these people had to be eliminated for the good of the social order. Now it was possible to transport this criminal elite, along with assorted political prisoners and other social undesirables, to a place where they would be free to be their immoral or amoral selves and still retain the inventiveness necessary to come up with something the Confederacy could use.

  The perfect prison. Only, of course, what that accomplished was to place the most brilliant sociopathic—and psychopathic—minds together in one place, in contact with one another. They and their descendants built empires. Each world had unique attributes, held attractions for those the Confederacy and its Assassins had not yet caught. Cash could be shunted away to Cerberan and Medusan banks; loot of all kinds could be hidden forever on Charon or Cerberus until needed. Even Lilith, which would tolerate nothing alien, was a true repository for secrets channeled in and out of its protected orbital satellites to trusted members of the Lilith hierarchy. The strongest, cleverest, and nastiest reached the top and held power over planet-wide criminal syndicates whose influence reached into the heart of the Confederacy. The heads of these syndicates called themselves the Four Lords of the Diamond, and they were doing a nice job getting even with the society that sent them there. Now they were working for an alien enemy that had the potential to destroy the entire system, a fact the Confederacy discovered very late in the aliens’ game—and almost by accident

  The humans had little defense, as the aliens surely had realized. Agents sent to the Warden worlds faced almost certain death if discovered. If not, they were stuck there along with the criminal lords and their descendants and subject people. The situation tended to make keeping an agent loyal a big problem, since there was nothing he or she could be offered as a reward and it was a lifetime job. One such agent, a volunteer, became one of the Four Lords himself.

  Yet the Confederacy’s only link to the alien menace that might attack and destroy them at any time was the Warden Diamond. They had to put not just agents down there but their best—and they finally figured out a way to do it, more or less. They took their best agent, an Assassin First Class of absolutely impeccable loyalty and devotion, and then introduced him to the Merton Process, by which the personality and memories of someone could be stored in a computer and then fed into other bodies.

  The original minds in those surrogate bodies were of course destroyed. Twenty or thirty individuals died before a personality graft “took,” but that was all right—they were all antisocials anyway. Thus was then- best agent “placed” into four totally different bodies and dispatched to the four Warden worlds. Once there, each had to act alone to find out what he could of the alien menace and, in any case, to accomplish a true Assassin’s task—kill each of the Four Lords of the Diamond, causing at least a disruption in leadership that might buy the Confederacy some time.

  All the while the original Assassin sat in orbit off the Warden worlds on the picket ship that enforced the quarantine and waited for his four alter egos to report so that he could correlate what they found with his analytical computer.

  Three of the four had within them a tiny organic transmitter that the computer and special satellites could pick up signals from and amplify, making them walking communicators on the surface. Raw data would be fed constantly to the analytical computer, then through a process called integration the computer and original agent could be linked, his own mind sorting the raw data bits into a subjective report that could be used to evaluate the raw data. The transmitter gave them what the alter ego on the planets said and did; the integration process gave what he thought.

  The same man could thus be four different places at once while he also evaluated the information as an objective observer. Each agent would try to assassinate the Lord of his particular world; the original would try and take their experiences to solve the riddle of the alien’ menace.

  But on Lilith things had gone both right and wrong. Right because the job had been done, but wrong in that the man had changed, or been changed, by his experiences, by his isolation, by his hatred of his other self, up in space.

  Two reports had come in almost at the same time. Lilith was taken first, and it shook the watcher’s self-confidence and self-image. Nothing had happened the way it should have. The mission was on track, but in the process his own ego had somehow gotten derailed.

  Cerberus would be the second report, and he was very nervous about facing it. He didn’t fear for the mission—that was a different matter. He feared what he might find out about himself. But after a night in the ship’s lounge and a fitful sleep that didn’t help at all, he knew he would go back, knew he would undergo the process. He feared neither death nor any enemy, and in fact had only now found the one thing he did fear.

  Himself.

  And so he finally approached the reclining chair once again. Slowly, hesitantly, he relaxed, and the computer lowered the small probes which he placed around his head; the computer then administered the measured injections and began the master readout.

  For a while he floated in a semi hypnotic fog, but slowly the images began forming in his brain as they had before. Only now they seemed more definite, clearer, more like his own thoughts.

  The drugs and small neural probes did their job. His own mind and personality receded, replaced by a similar, yet oddly different pattern.

  “The agent is aware that no
transmitter was possible with Cerberus,” the computer reminded him. “It was necessary to land the needed equipment at predetermined points by remote and, at the time of cerebral imprinting, to place an absolute command to report at intervals. Subjectively, however, the process to you will be the same.”

  The agent didn’t react, didn’t think, just accepted the information. He was no longer himself, but someone else, someone like him and yet in many ways quite different

  “The agent is commanded to report,” the computer ordered, sending the command deep into his own mind, a mind no longer his own. What would follow would be a sort of total recall from the mind of his counterpart down below, which his own mind would sort, classify, and edit into a coherent narrative, a narrative in the form of a report.

  Recorders clicked on.

  The man in the chair cleared his throat several times. It still took more than three hours to get him to do more than mumble some odd words or sounds, but computers are nothing if not patient, knowing that the man’s mind was receiving a massive amount of data and struggling to cope with it.

  Finally, though, as if in a dream, the man began to speak.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Rebirth

  After being briefed by Commander Krega and a little preparation to put my own affairs in order—this would be a long assignment—I checked into the Confederacy Security Clinic. I’d been here many times before, of course, but not knowingly for this purpose. Mostly, this was where they programmed you with whatever information you’d need for a mission and where, too, you were “reintegrated.” Naturally, the kind of work I did was often extralegal—a term I prefer to illegal, which implies criminal intent. All agents had their own experience of a mission wiped from their minds whenever it involved sensitive matters.