Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold flotd-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  Bork hunting, however, I passed on, at least for the time. It seemed that bork were monstrous, nasty creatures that inhabited the oceans, seemed to be composed entirely of teeth, and occasionally grew large enough to swallow boats whole. They had a natural dislike of everything and everybody and were even known to attack boats just for being there, and sometimes, even to snare a low-flying shuttle. Hunting them just required too many specialized skills, and that sport had no initial appeal for me. Though bork were nasty, the oceans contained an enormous number of creatures that had some commercial uses, from unicellular protein creatures that linked together into floating beds kilometers long to smaller sea creatures that provided edible meat, skins, and other such things. Bork hunting might be a thrill for some, but to the ocean harvesting corporations it was a commercial necessity.

  The flying creatures with such names as geeks and gops, made me wonder just what sort of person first named all these things. The flying things, mostly small, served the function of insects on other worlds, cross-pollinating this jungle from the top. In addition, there were a few predatory fliers that were monsters, too. One giant flier with a thick barrel-like body about a meter around had a neck more than three meters long and a wingspread of more than ten meters. Its head looked like a nightmare of blazing reptilian eyes and sharp teeth, but nobody much paid attention to them as long as they didn’t come too close. These were carrion eaters mostly, and they remained aloft over the oceans much of the time.

  Body switching was rare, although I was approached once or twice in a casual way. Every once in a while somebody new would show up who would turn out to be somebody old after all. Although few people switched—except for the occasional couple that switched almost nightly, always with each other—the subject was nonetheless a regular topic of conversation in lounges and at parties. The possibility was always there, around you, even if you, didn’t see it. You were reminded of it constantly when you went home or stayed at a hotel on a company trip, and you always slept shielded and alone, no matter how friendly or intimate you became with others.

  There were some topics nobody really referred to, though. One was children—you just didn’t discuss it—and second was advancing age. Few people you met looked any older than forty, and those who looked the oldest seemed much more jittery and under a lot more pressure than most.

  Body switching ended any sort of sexual stereotypes, to a greater extent even than on the civilized worlds. When gender could so easily be exchanged, it seemed silly to think of separate sexual roles, particularly since it seemed that all the women I met had been sterilized. That, too, interested me—this was true of both sexes on the civilized worlds where all breeding was done in bio-breeding centers, but the actuality seemed particularly peculiar here. So when I saw the pregnant girl, I was drawn irresistibly to her.

  I had taken to frequenting a small store near the docks which specialized in entertainment electronics and which seemed to have some sort of a remarkable underground connection stretching off-world at some point that got a lot of the latest performances from the civilized worlds. Here was a piece of home, a place where you might run into other former prisoners, now exiles like myself, there also to get a little taste and memory of what was lost. She was there one day, looking over the latest selections. A tiny young woman—it was impossible to think of her other than as a girl. From her looks, she could hardly have been out of her mid-teens. She had extremely long reddish-brown hair, perhaps a meter or more in length, that was held loosely with a brightly sparkling headband.

  Actually, I wouldn’t have known she was pregnant except for Otah, the owner of the place. I happened to be talking gadgets with him, as usual, when I spotted her. “Hmmm. Cute. Never saw her around here before.”

  “You stay away from that one,” Otah warned gravely. “She’s with child.”

  I frowned. “First time I’ve heard that here. I was beginning to wonder how any of the natives came about. But what’s the taboo?”

  “Pregnant. Don’t you know? It’s not a condition, it’s a Class II occupation.”

  Well, there it was at last. “It’s a job? She makes a living having babies?”

  He nodded. “Hell of a tiling, ain’t it? There’s a whole colony of them down off Akeba. There’s some that love it, but most of ’em would kill to switch bodies outta there. Once you’re that, you’re that. Best to keep ’em on a business basis only.”

  I had to chuckle. “What do they do? Steal your soul?”

  He looked stricken. “Don’t say that. Some of ’em’s desperate enough to do most anything.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle at his caution and wonder just what could be so horrible. I did sort of wonder about the whole idea, though. Cloning was certainly within the allowable technology, if they wanted to spend the massive setup costs. Instead they seemed to have opted to take a percentage of young women, probably selected for genetic characteristics, and paid them to have kids. It seemed to me that, except for the birth itself, the major problem would be boredom—or perhaps being harried to death with a nursery full.

  Certainly I’d never heard of motherhood being something horrible. On some, of the more primitive frontier worlds it was something of an occupation and had been since the dawn of time. This was a piece of the social puzzle I had wanted to fill in, and here was the opportunity.

  In order not to alarm Otah, I didn’t approach her in the shop, but surreptitiously followed her when she left. After some window-shopping, she went to a sidewalk cafe and sat down at one of the outside tables, apparently enjoying the sun and salt spray. I allowed her to order, then casually walked up and into the cafe patio, and stopped as if seeing her for the first time.

  “Well, hello!” I said. “I just saw you in Otah’s.”

  She smiled and nodded. “Yes, I saw you in there, too.” She gestured. “Care to join me?”

  “Glad to,” I responded, and sat down. “Qwin Zhang,” I introduced myself.

  “I’m Sanda Tyne,” she told me. “You’re from the civilized worlds, aren’t you? Outside?”

  I nodded. “How did you know? My looks?”

  “Oh, no. Your accent. We have a couple of Outside girls at Akeba House. You can always tell.”

  “I hadn’t been aware I had an accent,” I told her honestly, filing that one away for future work. Analyze speech patterns and do comparative analysis to eliminate accent when needed. “Still, you say you have a couple of people from offworld at—Akeba House, was it?” I paused for a carefully measured moment. “You know, Otah told me to stay in the back of the shop while you were there. He acted like you had some kind of terrible disease or something.”

  She laughed, a nice, musical laugh that complimented her low, sexy voice. “I know,” she told me, then made her face up into a caricature of Otah’s and lowered her voice still more. “Stay away from her. She makes babies!” I had to laugh at the perfect imitation. “That’s about it. Maybe I’m naive, but what’s so horrible? If somebody didn’t do it at the dawn of time we wouldn’t be here.” She sighed, then seemed to turn a little more serious. “Oh, it’s not that it’s bad. It’s not great, either. True, you get an almost unlimited expense account, and you live pretty good—Akeba House is like a really great high-class hotel—-but after a while it gets to be a pain. Some of us get picked as little girls, but most of us chose it when we had to. At fourteen they come and tell you, sterilization or motherhood, and some, like me, got dumb and chose the latter. For a while it’s a lot of fun-—particularly the early stuff. But after several years and several babies the whole thing gets very boring. You’re sick for months every morning, and you’re restricted in what you can eat, drink, or even do. And you become limited. You learn how to make, have, and raise babies, and that’s it. You can’t get out once you’re in, as you can with any other job. You’re stuck. And when you see other women, like the ones you grew up with, with good jobs really doing something with their lives, you think you wasted it all, blew it.”

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nbsp; I nodded, more or less understanding her point. “You’re pretty frank with a stranger,” I noted. She shrugged. “Why not?”

  There wasn’t a good response to that one. “Why this taboo on talking about kids, though?”

  She looked at me strangely. “Right off the boat, aren’t you? Hell, think about it. Ever seen any old people?”

  “No. I assume the bodies wind up on mines someplace.”

  She nodded. “You got it. And where do the new bodies come from? A certain percentage come from us, that’s where. A baby a year, every year, and only a small population growth. It’s tough. They take most of ’em away from us after only a year—a real heartbreaker, too. Most of us send ’em all away to government child-care centers so we don’t have to go through any more pain than we have to. Have ’em, nurse ’em, then forget ’em. Some get hardened to it, but some just get sick of it or fed up. You’re trapped, though, and you just keep at it until the docs say you gotta stop. Then you get a fresh young body if you have done well and made your life quota.”

  I had to admit it was sounding less and less pleasant. I was beginning to see why Laroo’s assumption of power had been accompanied by a population increase all out of proportion to the numbers. Although the system probably predated him, he would order stepped-up life quotas strictly out of paranoia. The top leadership’s one nightmare would be a declining birthrate.

  “Surely you can quit. A simple operation—”

  She laughed derisively. “Sure. And forget all about being reborn into a new body. Because you lack any useful skills, there’s only the dirtiest labor jobs to make any sort of a living, and that would be only if they let you. Most likely you’d just not find a job, be declared a vagrant, and then it’s a one-way trip to the mines, or maybe they’d just knock you off. Those mines are mostly automated—most folks don’t think too many people are really sent anywhere.”

  More information to file, but the subject was becoming increasingly unpleasant. “I don’t know about that lack of useful skills, though,” I told her. “You have a pretty good vocabulary.”

  She shrugged. “Mostly self-taught. You get bored and have to do something, A lot of girls are artists or try and write stuff or things like that. Me, I just read and watch Otah’s bootlegs. Hell, I’m just twenty, bore four kids with another comin’ in six months, and I’m already climbing the walls. I got fifteen, maybe twenty more years of this before they let me out. And you know what they’ll do? Give me another fifteen-year-old girl’s body and put me back at it again! After twenty years I’d be an expert at nothin’ but motherhood.”

  The bitterness and frustration in her voice was very real, and for the first time I understood Otah’s attitude and the attitude of most Cerberans toward both the mothers and the subject of children. Nobody liked to think of children, since they realized that was where their new bodies would come from. Having once been young themselves, they really didn’t like to think they were robbing some kid of a lifetime, advancing him or her from fifteen or forty-five in one step, perhaps condemning him or her to death or forced labor on some airless moon. They knew—but they wanted to live, wanted their new bodies, and so they just didn’t talk about it, tried not to think about it, on the grounds that facts ignored were not facts at all. Seeing those who bore those children brought up all the guilt, so they were treated in the same way as people with some horrible disease. And they did carry such a plague—it was called conscience.

  What this told me was that they had already sold their souls. Sold them to Wagant Laroo. The population of Cerberus took on a whole new light for me that day, there in the bright sunshine and salt air. I remembered old horror stories of vampires—the living dead who drank the blood of the living to survive, to be immortal. And that’s what Cerberus really was—a planet of vampires.

  You’re lucky to be sent to Cerberus. Here you might live forever!

  Yeah, in absolute slavery to a government that could grant you eternal life—at the cost of an innocent child’s life—or take it away.

  “I don’t understand why they don’t just invest in cloning,” I told her. “They would still control the bodies and thus the people.”

  “They can’t,” she told me. “The Warden organism can’t cope with a clone in the early stages. The natural way’s the only way on any of the Diamond worlds.”

  Well, so much for the easy way out, I told myself. Still, there had to be better ways than this. Better managed with less heartbreak. I took a fresh look at Sanda Tyne. Tragic figure, perhaps, but the ultimate vampire herself.

  “I would think the lure of eternal life wouldn’t be enough for some people,” I noted. “Some might prefer death.”

  “Not outside the motherhood,” she responded. “And inside, yes, you’re right. But they monitor us very carefully for signs of depression and suicidal tendencies. Almost nobody really goes through with it—maybe two or three a year. The rest—well, I guess the will to live is too strong. And if you try it and don’t make it, they can put you through the ringer. You don’t have to have much of a brain to do what we do. They take you into a little room, point a little laser probe here”—she pointed to her forehead—“and zap! You walk around with this nice little smile on your face and you don’t do or think of nothin’, but you can still have babies.” She shivered. “I think I’d rather die than that—but you see? The penalty for not dyin’ is so much worse.”

  What a cheery afternoon I’m having, I thought sourly. Still, I truly understood and sympathized with Sanda and the others like her. There were better ways, I felt sure. Not less cruel, perhaps, to some of the children, for there would be a revolution here if the new’ bodies for old potential was destroyed, but at least for the people like Sanda. A technological world should allow mothers to be anything they wanted as well, and it should be able to meet its need not only to grow but also to replace. There was a simple system that would at least put the responsibility where it belonged.

  Everyone could be forced to bear his own replacement. Then he alone would have the option of killing his offspring or himself in the normal way. And, with body switching, assuming sterility was ended, everyone could bear his own replacement. That it was the only fair way. It wouldn’t end cruelty to the kids who got stuck as replacements, but far fewer would take that option—and nobody could sweep the responsibility under a mental rug.

  This body-switching business sounded great at the beginning, but I was beginning now to see it for what it was—a disease. A disease that was population-wide and required a totalitarian system to maintain.

  This realization made my assignment easier—and more urgent. I no longer had any thought whatsoever about not doing away with Wagant Laroo. And, at least for the period of time needed to create a real social revolution on Cerberus, I intended to be Lord myself.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Glimmer of a Plan

  Over the next few weeks I continued to meet with Sanda, whom I not only felt sorry for but genuinely liked. She seemed to enjoy the company of someone from a place she would never see and a background she could hardly imagine—one who treated her as a person, not a pariah. I was, however, becoming restless and a little impatient. By this point I felt I had enough contacts and enough elements put together to get into action. But I lacked the proper starting point, the opening I needed to have any chance of success.

  My long-range objective was clear: locate and kill Wagant Laroo, then somehow assume political control of the syndicalist machinery that would allow me to retailor this world for the better. The fact that my plan dovetailed with the wishes of the Confederacy was all to the good, since I didn’t want any problems from that quarter and I knew that somehow they were keeping tabs on me, probably with the aid of blackmailable agents down here—exiles with family or something else to lose back home.

  My experience at Tooker convinced me that computer and robotic science on Cerberus was too far behind the Confederacy to be directly linked to the alien robots, but I still had suspicio
ns. At least a few really good minds in the organic computer field had wound up here. Though their names occasionally cropped up in shoptalk at parties and the like, they were nowhere in evidence. Of course Tooker wasn’t the only or even the largest computer firm on Cerberus, but it was definitely a middleweight in the economic mainstream, unlikely to be left out of any major deals. Part of the trouble was I was still too low down in the hierarchical ranks to even hear the tumors of anything so secret.

  Therefore, several steps had to be taken before I could even consider Laroo, one being I first had to make friends in high places who could be of help with such information as well as with favors. I also needed considerably more money than I had or could easily make—and some way to conceal it if I could figure out a way. Not that I couldn’t steal money from banks-—that was relatively easy with this computer system. The trouble was, money had to be put somewhere. In an all-electronic currency system it would show a conspicuous bulge. To disguise a stash properly would take a major operation with major resources. In other words, it would take a fortune to steal and hide a fortune.

  Finally, after money and influence, I’d need somebody on the inside of Laroo’s top operation. No mean trick. But that was the last of my problems and was contingent on the other two.

  I traveled to Akeba one weekend mostly thinking these dark thoughts and hoping something would break my way. I had to go down there now to see Sanda, who was starting to show and so was generally restricted to her area, more by social custom than by any firm law.

  Akeba House was a huge complex located on its own network. It resembled the hotel I’d stayed in my first night in town. I could see a swimming pool, various game courts, and other resortlike additions, and was told there were more such inside. But it was restricted territory, so I could get only to the gate.