Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail flotd-4

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Just take seats anywhere and get accustomed to the temperature change,” Gorn told us. “This room and the three adjoining rooms have been raised to 21° for your initial comfort. These are the only directly heated rooms, so stay within them at all times. We chose this area to heat because, with no windows or other outside vents, it is the most efficient system.” He walked over to a nearby door. “If you’ll come in here, 111 show you the rest of the place.”

  We followed—slowly, still not recovered completely from exposure—and found that the second room was a large barrackslike area with eight double bunks, four on each side of the hall. The mattresses appeared to be paper-thin and none too comfortable, but I’d seen worse. The place was well-maintained, although obviously seldom used. Beyond was a third large room, with a large common shower and three open standard toilets, plus four small sinks with mirrors. Again it looked seldom-used, but serviceable.

  We followed Sgt. Corn back to the “lounge” area and took seats. As yet nobody had removed his thermal clothing and I had no inclination to do so myself. I felt as if I would never be warm again.

  It was Cpl. Sugra’s turn at us. She looked like a lot of women cops I’ve met in my work—not unattractive, but hard, cold, and worldly; her voice matched. For the first time I could look at her and Gorn and see a bit beyond the manner and the uniforms. Their complexions, which at the spaceport and on the bus were a granitelike gray, now seemed lighter, almost orange. There was a certain toughness to their skin, which, on close inspection, resembled the hides of great animals. Soft they were not.

  “I’m Corporal Sugra,” she began, reintroducing herself. “Sergeant Gorn and I will be with you over the next week. We will be staying right down the hall from this complex and will be available to answer your questions and give you basic preparation. At various times others from the government will come in to talk about specific areas. Now, we understand you have just come from a bitter experience, and you are now most concerned about what this new world is like and what it both has for you and will do for you.”

  And to me, I thought.

  “First of all, is there anyone here who does not know why Medusa and the other worlds of the Warden Diamond are used by the Confederacy for exile?” She paused a moment, then seemed satisfied that we all knew at least the basics.

  “The microorganism that is now within all of your bodies will be making itself at home. Please don’t be alarmed. You will find there is no sensation, no feeling at all that anything is different. In fact, you will probably feel increasingly better as this process goes on because, despite the best medical care, the human system is riddled with disease and physical problems of one sort or another. Since the Warden organism depends on you for its place to live, it wants that place to be in as good a condition as possible. So it will repair what is wrong, make more efficient that which is inefficient, and will not only cure you of any diseases or infections you might have but prevent any new ones. That’s how it pays you back; it’s a good deal.”

  A big, gruff-looking man near me gave a low cough. “Yeah—but what’s our price?” he grumbled.

  “There is no … price, as you call it,” she responded. “As you may know, it is theorized that the Warden organism was native only to the planet Lilith and was spread by early explorers to the other three worlds, where it mutated to survive. Some people on Lilith have the power to order the Wardens around, inflicting pain and pleasure and in some cases even creating and destroying through willpower alone. On Charon this ability is even more pronounced, with physical and mental power giving those trained in controlling their Wardens almost magical abilities over themselves and others. On Cerberus minds are actually exchanged between the people as a by-product of the Warden organism. In all cases there are more positives than minuses in the by-products. But here on Medusa survival dominates all other things. The organism here is more colonial in nature, sticking to whatever it’s in and not bothering with others.”

  “You can’t be saying that there’s no effect,” a skeptical woman put in.

  “No, there is an effect, but it is limited to each individual. It is also universal and automatic, so that no willpower or training is required. Everyone can use it equally, making Medusa a far better place. What it did to us, what it is doing to you, is totally altering your basic biochemistry. We look human, we act human; but under the microscope we are not human. Here, on Medusa, the Warden colonies survive in us only as long as we ourselves survive. So the colonies mutated humanity here to survive the climate, no matter what. The changes are far more extensive and comprehensive than on the other three planets. Our entire cellular structure is modified, with each Warden colony in each cell in total and complete control, ready to act at a moment’s notice, either independently or collectively as required.”

  “To what end?” I asked, genuinely curious. “What does it do?”

  “Instant adaptation to whatever the needs of the organism are,” she told us. “We can survive almost any temperature extreme. Our bodies can consume and use almost any substance to provide whatever energy is needed under any conditions. We could go stark naked into that snowy wilderness you saw coming in and we would neither freeze nor starve. Water is our only requirement. We can adapt to extremes of radiation, drink boiling water, even walk barefoot on hot coals. Medusans are in every way superior to humanity, or even to those of the other three worlds. Instant evolution, it’s been called. What we need, we have or become. As I say, the system is automatic—no thought or direction is required.”

  “That’s why the bus and buildings were unheated,” I thought aloud. “You don’t need heat.”

  She nodded. “Natural insulation is enough to keep everything fairly uniform and comfortable for us. These uniforms mark our station and rank, and provide such handy things as pockets. They in no way provide protection, because we don’t need any—and neither will you.”

  She paused to let that sink in a bit, then looked over at Sgt. Gorn and nodded to him. He took up the briefing.

  “For now you will remain in these specially heated and insulated quarters,” he told us. “Over the course of a week, the Warden organism will make Medusans out of you physically. Our purpose is to make you Medusans socially and politically as well. We have here a society that is one of man’s old dreams. Every single man, woman, and child here is superior in every physical way. To that our current First Minister, Talant Ypsir, has added his considerable skills at political organization and social engineering to create a highly advanced society. On Lilith or Charon you might wind up as primitive migrant workers. Here we are technologically advanced, with all that implies. Your place in our society will be determined by your mind and skills, not by any physical or technological limitations. This world looks harsh, I know, but once it no longer threatens you it becomes a world of wonder and beauty and comfort. You are lucky to be Medusans, considering the alternatives.”

  I wondered about that.

  The barracks-style setup meant we nine would get to know one another pretty well, at least in a superficial sense. Although one couple preferred not to talk at all about their pasts, from the six who would it was clear that this was a very unusual crop. Every single one of the six—seven, including my cover—had killed at least one other human being in a cold and premeditated way. I suspected that all nine of us represented the most violent kinds of criminal minds. No smugglers or embezzlers here—we were the cream of the crop.

  As the “kid” in the group, I found the others curiously kind and protective toward me, almost to a one. Those who have never encountered real criminals before might find that a bit hard to believe; but, in fact, most criminals are pretty nice, ordinary people except for one little area. All these people were extraordinary, because in contrast to my—Tarin Bul’s—rather direct and sloppy job, they had all killed in extremely clever technological ways.

  Just how Talant Ypsir planned to turn such people into model citizens of his new superior society we all discovered the
next day. A tall man came in, looking granite-gray in the same way Gorn and Sugra had when we’d first met them. He introduced himself as Solon Kabaye, Gray Basin’s Political Commissioner. His uniform was all black but still styled in the military manner. He had gold braid on his sleeves and a golden-colored belt. On his pocket was the obvious government symbol—a stylized woman’s head with a hair full of what had to be snakes. His manner was easygoing and conversational, like that of most politicians; I may have been the only one to notice his skin color change from that light gray to the Granger shade of Gorn and Sugra. Here was a graphic indication that something inside him worked very differently from anything we were accustomed to.

  “I’m going to be basic and blunt,” he told us, “because that’s the best way to start. Let’s go over a couple of facts right away, shall we? First—you’re stuck. There is no escape from Medusa, no place to run. Therefore, you’d best get used to the world as quickly as possible and settle in as best you can. Your future—the rest of your lives—is here, tied to Medusa. The system works, and it works well. It takes into account our planetary assets, our inherent problems and limitations as Warden citizens, and it gives a strong measure of prosperity to the people. The system evolved over the past century, as various ideas were tried and discarded. This one works. You didn’t ask to be here—but you put yourselves here by your own actions. We didn’t ask for you, either. Frankly, unless you possess some new technological knowledge that could be of use to us, you’re not really needed here. So we have to find out just where you fit—then you fit. You either fit, or you take that last step into the deferred oblivion from which coming here saved you. That’s the bottom line.”

  This was tough talk, and very discomforting as well. Still, it was also very professionally timed. We were stuck here, on an alien world, waiting for a something we couldn’t see, hear, or feel to take over our bodies. Quite simply, we had no real options. After the first night they had even taken away the thermal wear while we slept, leaving us with nothing but flimsy white hospital-type gowns. Try to run now, boy, out into a frigid wilderness.

  “Sounds like the Confederacy,” Turnel, the ruddy, gruff resident grouch of our group noted half under his breath. Of course Kabaye heard him and smiled slightly.

  “Perhaps it does. The Confederacy is a society that exists because it works. That doesn’t make it the best society, or the most efficient, or anything else, but it’s there because it works for the majority of people.”

  “Well, we’re the minority,” noted Edala, a tough, worldly woman prisoner.

  “True,” Kabaye agreed. “We all are. I was born and raised in the Confederacy, same as you. So was Talant Ypsir, our First Minister. And now we’re here, and you’re here, and, ironically, folks like the First Minister and myself find ourselves the government rather than opposed to the government. We’re faced with the same problems as the Confederacy, and we have additional problems because of Medusa’s limitations. Our advantage, though, is that Medusa is the wealthiest of the Warden worlds since we control the raw-materials sources, and, with a Warden organism not trying to get in the way of building stuff, we can best exploit these resources. So, let me tell you the score here and then I’ll tell you how you fit in.”

  The “score,” as it were, was that we came from a somewhat totalitarian society that believed in the basic goodness of man to a very totalitarian society run by men and women who were convinced that humans would always, given a choice, do the wrong thing. Therefore, a society tightly and rigidly controlled, in which all the rules were known and posted and no violations were tolerated, was Ypsir’s new vision. It turned out to be not nearly as new as he thought, but a very old idea indeed.

  There were less than thirteen million Medusans, scattered around the so-called temperate zones in small, en-, closed cities and towns linked by magne-bus and a freight service using the same tracks. Electric power was generated basically by geothermal wells, and the location and size of the cities were determined by just how much power was available. Medusa controlled the Diamond’s freighter fleet, digging raw materials out of the mineral-rich moons of the next nearest neighbor out-system, the great ringed gas giant Momrath. These were unloaded at specific freight terminals strategically located around the planet so that the cities could be most economically served. The reason for cities like Gray Basin was not only their large geothermal sources of power, but also because, being so far north, magne-tracks could be laid over the permanently frozen ocean to the north and thus connect continents. All travel was available, but it was expensive, subject to frequent nasty weather conditions, and not practical for heavy freight.

  Some of the cities were quite large, but most had between fifty and a hundred thousand people. All were self-contained, and all nonequatorial ones were, like Gray Basin, dug in rather than built on the surface; and each one specialized in just a few industries. Gray Basin, for example, specialized in transportation and related industries on the surface. All of the magne-busses, some of the freight containers, and much of the buried guidance track were made here. One town built computers—a surprise to me, since I’d assumed that such things would be strictly prohibited by the Confederacy guardians. A few specialized in food production and distribution, mostly synthetics and food imported from Lilith and Charon. It was true, as Sugra had told us, that we could eat almost anything—yet, as Kabaye was quick to point out, the fact that we could eat human flesh did not mean that we preferred it to steak. Being able to eat something was not the same as either liking it or enjoying it.

  Clearly Medusa’s economy worked closely with that of Cerberus, next in-system. The Cerberans helped design the products Medusa made, and handled just about all the computer software, as well as taking raw materials like basic steel, plastics, and the like we turned out and making things that were of use on their and other worlds but not here. For example, the very concept of a speedboat was ridiculous on Medusa, but on the Cerberan water world speedboats were in great demand.

  The factories and industries of Medusa were basically automated, but there was a job for every human. Natives went to state schools from ages four to twelve, then were examined in a number of areas including aptitudes and intelligence potential and placed in the particular training track for which they were most suited. This was a bit more ponderous than the Confederacy’s method of breeding you to your job, but it served the same purpose.

  Also contrary to Confederacy custom, families were maintained for those early years, although they were often nontraditional and always “state-determined. Group marriages and group families were the rule, partly because of the need to bear and raise children and partly in the name of “efficiency,” a word of which I was already tiring.

  There were forty-four wage steps, or grades possible, although the top four grades were strictly top government personnel and there was only one Grade 44, naturally.

  The easiest way to think of the society, I reflected, was as if everybody—every man, woman, and child—were in the military, attached to a mission section. Within that section were most of the grades, with grade reflecting rank and, therefore, power. The state, or your section of it, provided common meal facilities, food, clothing, and shelter, and also made available the amenities that could be bought with the money you made. The pay seemed relatively low until you remembered that all the basics were taken care of and anything you earned could be spent on luxuries.

  There were three shifts a day, each running eight hours, with the hours adjusted for the differences from Confederacy norm. The work week was six days, with the seventh off, but different industries took different days off so there was no universal off day. To make sure all worked well and smoothly, there was the Monitor Service.

  I suspected it was this Monitor Service idea that got Talant Ypsir his one-way ticket from the Confederacy to the Diamond. Though I doubt if it would work on a thousand worlds spread over a quarter of a galaxy, the system worked fine, it seemed, on Medusa, though none of us liked i
t, least of all me.

  Every single room in every single city and town was monitored. Not just the rooms, but the streets, alleyways, buses, you name it. Just about every single thing anyone said or did was monitored and recorded by a master computer or, really, the huge computer bank that was actually in orbit around the planet. Whoever wrote the computer program should be tortured to death.

  Now, obviously, not even the galaxy’s greatest computer could really analyze all that data, and this was where Ypsir was diabolically clever. The Monitor Service, a sort of police force that ran this system and was generally just called TMS, programmed the computers to look for certain things—phrases, actions, who except for them knew what?—that would cause a computer to “flag” you. Then a human TMS agent would sit down and with the computer’s aid review anything about you he or she wanted, then haul you in to see why you were acting so funny or being so subversive. Nobody knew what the flag codes were, and a certain amount of totally random harassment was maintained by TMS just so the bright guys couldn’t figure them out.

  The system, as Kabaye pointed out proudly, did, in fact, work. Productivity was extremely high, absenteeism and shirking extremely low. Crime was almost nonexistent, except for the rare crime of passion which the computer couldn’t flag in time to stop. But even if you managed to commit it, as soon as the crime was discovered the TMS could call up the whole scene and see exactly what was what.

  Violators were tried in secret by TMS courts, extremely quickly it seemed, and given punishment ranging from demotion to being handed over to the psychs—many of whom were Confederacy crooks and sadists sentenced here themselves—for whatever they felt like doing to your mind. The ultimate punishment, for treason, was what was known as Ultimate Demotion—you were snipped off on a very unpleasant one-way trip to the mines of Momrath’s moons.

  It was an ugly system, and extremely difficult to fight or circumvent unless you knew exactly where the monitor devices were and what would and would not constitute a flag. That made it a near-impossible challenge, particularly for a kid whose background would suggest that he not be allowed too near any world leaders. In a sense, though, I liked it. Not only was this a real challenge, perhaps my supreme challenge; but Medusa was, after all, my type of world—technologically oriented and dependent on that technology. If I could find a way, too, the system would actually help. TMS, and, therefore, Talant Ypsir, must be pretty damn confident and secure.