Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Facts About Myself, Some Psych Work, and Fruition

During the waiting period, Dylan began her sessions with Dumonia—and so did I, since convincing her that I loved her no matter what incarnation was at the heart of the whole thing. It was true. I did love her, and if frontier wife was her new goal, then that was fine with me. I wanted her to be happy, and as Dr. Dumonia had noted, under the present circumstances she was not. What was intended was to give her a sense of security—which in its own way was somewhat ironic. I was arranging to kill Wagant Laroo and at the same time trying to make Dylan secure.

What was really interesting about the process was that during a few sessions some of her visions of me and my earlier caper slipped out, as inevitably they would. Although I was paying Dumonia enough to ensure he kept his medical ethics about him, I was more than slightly amused when I discovered that he totally misread this one as another of Dylan’s romantic fantasies in which I had somehow became involved. That computer fraud scheme had been so nutty and unbelievable that even her psych refused to believe it. That, of course, had been precisely why I had done it the way l had.

Naturally, during the process, I had to undergo a bit myself, but I wasn’t really worried. My early training and conditioning automatically switched in under such probes, giving the psychs whatever information I wanted them to have. My probing also wasn’t deep, but was only directed toward my feelings about Dylan and so I was on relatively safe ground. At the end of the second session with the psych and his machines, however, I got one shock.

“Did you know you have two surface-planted command impulses?” He asked me. “Been to a psych before?”

“No,” I answered, slightly worried, “I know of one that should be there. Basic data about Cerberus. It was a, new process they were trying with me to help people get acclimated.”

He nodded. “We got that. Some of it, anyway. Quite thorough. But there’s another.”

I frowned and leaned forward. “Another?”

He nodded. “Actually, as I said, two. Two commands, in addition to the briefing.”

I was beginning to get worried, not only because I didn’t know what these were—all my agent conditioning would be beyond these machines—but also because they might betray me and who I really was. “Do you know what they are?”

“One is treasonous,” he replied, sounding as objective as he did when discussing mundane matters. “It appears to be a command to kill Wagant Laroo if you can. Actually more of a reinforcement—designed to make you detest him enough to kill him. Very nice job, really. I wonder if every new exile is being sent in with this sort of conditioning? Still, I wouldn’t worry about it. The readouts state that you’re really not violent or self-destructive. Though this impulse is enough to ensure that you’re never going to love the state and its glorious leader, it’s no stronger than your common impulses, which would be to damp down the actuality. We’d all like to kill somebody at one time or another, but few of us do. The impulse is no stronger than that. Unless you have a specific pre-Cerberan reason for wanting to do him in? Revenge?”

“No,” I responded smoothly. “Nothing like that. I never met the man, never even heard of him until I was told I was being sent here.”

“All right. But that makes the second one all the more puzzling.”

“Huh?”

“Basically it boils down to an instruction to call your office every so often when the opportunity’s offered you, then forget all about doing so. Do you understand that?”

Instantly I did understand, but the trouble was finding a way to explain it away, all the while mentally kicking myself for not thinking of this before. The sons of bitches! Of course! How could they track me, know what I was doing on Cerberus? The organic transmitter would cease functioning the moment I switched bodies. The answer was simple and staring me in the face, but I’d been too cocky to think of it before.

There were other agents here somewhere. Probably local people, perhaps with something they wanted from outside, or perhaps exiles with close friends, family, something to lose back home. Blackmailable, to a degree. How many times had one of these come to me, perhaps when I was walking alone or on the road, and told me to call the office? Lead me, then, to a transceiver of some sort so I could send my doings up to my other self, sitting there off the Warden system. Done it, then promptly forgot it.

“I think I understand,” I told him. “My—ah, previous activities, well, they involved some complex dealings and some people in high places. These people need certain—codes, basically, to continue to enjoy what I no longer can. This, I think, is a form of blackmail.”

He smiled blandly at me. “You’re a plant, aren’t you? A Confederacy agent. Oh, don’t look startled. You’re not the first, nor the last. Don’t worry, I won’t rat on you. In fact it wouldn’t matter much if I did, all things considered. Your profile indicates you are highly independent, and that Cerberus, and particularly Dylan, has changed you, as something always does. They keep trying though.”

I sat back and sighed. “How did you know?”

“From the start—Qwin Zhang. Woman’s name. Woman’s body, when you came down. But you’re no woman. You’ve never been one, except for that brief and quite brilliant cover entrance. There are differences in the brain scans between males and females. Not ones you’d really notice, but not only am I an expert, I’m also on a world where such swapping goes on all the time, so I see all sorts of switches. Remember the physiological differences between the sexes. The brain governs them, and while new patterns might emerge, there are always traces of the old. Not in your case, though. So from your appearance here, I infer that the Confederacy’s finally figured out how to do what we can do naturally.”

“Not exactly,” I told him. “The attrition rate’s high. But they’re working on it.”

“Fascinating. They’ll have to suppress the knowledge, you know, except perhaps for the leadership and essential people. They’ll have to—such switching would disrupt their society enormously, perhaps beyond repair.” He smiled at the thought. “Well, it’s no big thing, since the Confederacy still has the unsolvable problem. Anybody capable enough to really cause damage as an agent that they send to a Warden world changes into one of the Warden Diamond’s best and most dangerous citizens. Tell me, do you really intend to kill Laroo?”

“I should kill you,” I noted icily. “You’re the most dangerous man on this planet to me. More than Laroo.”

“But you won’t,” he responded confidently. “For one thing, that would add lots of complications to whatever you’re doing now. For another, it would draw attention to you, even if you got away with it, since you’d be linked to me by your scheduled visits. I doubt if a man like you could stand being under a microscope right now. And finally, I think you realize that I couldn’t care less if you bump off Laroo, or settle down and enjoy life, or take over the whole damned place. If you did, it’d be a change, anyway. You must believe me, Zhang, when I tell you that you’re the seventh agent I’ve met and I haven’t turned one in yet. You surely must realize by now that my own fatal psychological flaw is that I’m a romantic revolutionary anarchist with no guts, but with a taste for the good life. If you weren’t sure I would stay bought, you wouldn’t have come to me in the first place.”

I relaxed, in spite of my old instincts. He was right, of course—and it was unlikely that I could do anything but trust him. This was a smart man who’d protect himself.

“Can you remove that ‘call the office’ command? At least the part about forgetting I did it?”

“Sadly, no. Not with what I have. However, both commands are simple enough that they could be canceled out.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Well, using the level and intensity of the patterns I have here, I could lay on a new set of commands of absolutely equal strength. For example, I could lay on one that said you liked Wagant Laroo and had good feelings whenever his name was mentioned. This would negate the other. If I phrased the command exactly right, you’d wind up in a love-hate relationship that would cancel. As for the other—well, I could give an equal command that you will not use a transceiver for off-planet communication. Same effect. You’d still go when called, but you wouldn’t tell ’em anything.”

“I’m not too concerned about those,” I told him. “At least not now. Later I might want to have that call command negated; right now it might be useful, although I’m not sure how. But I want to remember doing it, and what I did. Any tricks there?”

“After the fact, perhaps. After all, it’s all there, in your memory. You’re just barred from consciously recollecting it. I suspect that with a very strong neutral field under a psych converter, together with a hypnotic series, for example, we might be able to get the information out of you and recorded. When you awoke you still wouldn’t be able to remember it, but you could then examine the recording and get the data no matter what”

“All right,” I told him. “Let’s do it.”

The trick worked, after a fashion. I really don’t know what is being transmitted even now, you bastards, but I now know how it’s done and by whom. And how damnably obvious the whole thing was once the truth was out.

Who better to have such a spatial link with you than old fat, friendly Otah? An electronics shop with black-market connections. No wonder Otah could get whatever he needed in the way of bootleg gear! That’s how you pay him, right? Very clever. I should have thought of it as soon as I figured out that you had something to do with my being sent to Medlam, so close to Laroo’s Island, in the first place. Medlam, and associated with Tooker, a corporation well suited to my talents. And waiting there, where you knew I’d eventually go, was Otah.

Well, it didn’t matter now. In fact it helped. Now at least I knew who—and when.

Three weeks had passed since my dirty deeds at Emyasail, and I was beginning to feel nervous. Something, I felt sure, should have happened by now. I began to turn my mind to more direct, less devious, but more risky alternatives.

The one bright spot was Dylan, whose treatment was really helping. I’ll say this for Dumonia: although he is crazy as a loon and more amoral and cynical than I am, he really knows his stuff. I began to believe that in his own field he was one of the most brilliant men I had ever known. This is not to say that Dylan was anything like back to normal, but she was more comfortable with herself and with me, more like a real human being, and she seemed happier. Dumonia explained that he could do a lot, but the key breakthrough eluded him, the point of her own insecurity regarding me. It was a wall he couldn’t get past, a wall erected of her deep-rooted conviction that without the pity angle I would not like her as she wanted to be and would tire of her and leave. She was very wrong, of course, but her fear was deeply rooted in her understanding of the culture from which I came and the culture of Cerberus in which she had been raised—cultures minimizing close personal attachments and emotional factors. In the Cerberan culture you held your power and position by the favors owed you or by blackmail or by some other hook. So the idea of such things not being necessary was a cultural gap that seemed impossible to bridge. In reversed circumstances, I could see myself having the same hang-ups.

“If she weren’t under judgment, there are things that might be used,” Dumonia told me. “Unorthodox, maybe dangerous things, but quite effective. But as long as she’s trapped in that body we’re stuck.”

That thought depressed me a bit, since I most wanted the old Dylan back, a partner I could deal with as an equal, almost the part of me I’d gotten used to having. It was peculiar that I, the consummate loner, born and bred to be above such things and never before touched by them, should suddenly have this need, almost a craving, for someone else. I instinctively knew that it was my Achilles’ heel. Still, the fact that I had these weaknesses, didn’t matter to me as much as it had, and there was also the corner of my mind that said that everyone, even me at my old top form, had flaws and weaknesses anyway. Nobody was immune. The important thing was to recognize your own and get to know them so that perhaps they could also work for you.

A few days later, when I’d just about given up, my scam paid off. I was visited in midmorning at my Hroyasail office by a big, burly man whose dark eyes indicated an intelligence his general appearance belied.

“I’m Hurl Bogen,” he introduced himself, offering his hand, which I shook, then gestured for him to have a seat.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Bogen?”

“I’m the security coordinator for Chairman Laroo,” he told me, and my heart almost stopped. This was either very good or bad news. “You know he has an island resort south of here?”

I nodded. “I’m afraid I’ve even taken a vicarious look at it from one of our boats,” I told him honestly. If he didn’t already know that he should have. “Just out of curiosity.”

He grinned. “Yeah, lots of folks do. I don’t blame ’em and I don’t worry about it. Basically, though, we’ve run into a big problem with a project we’re working on over there and we need your help. We’ve contracted with Emyasail to keep steady supplies coming and going to and from the island, and it’s worked out fine until a couple of weeks ago. We got just creamed by borks—never saw so many of ’em in my life. We got most of ’em, but they did a pretty good job on Emyasail’s fleet. We’re down to a dozen trawlers, all smaller types, and just one gunboat.”

I feigned shock. “But hell, how many borks could you have? Those were good crews, and we haven’t had any problems of that sort. Matter of fact, we’ve been pretty damned peaceful around here the last few weeks, with only one or two reported and only one actual engagement”

He nodded ruefully. “No wonder. They were all down our way. The bio boys say that something attracted them down there, possibly a run of some chemical in subsurface currents. Rotten luck.”

I held my breath. “How many people were lost?”

“We were pretty lucky there, although we did lose a dozen or so. Luck of the job, really. You should know that. But the main thing is, we no longer have enough boats to meet our supply needs. We’ve limped along with what we had for a while, using some air supply for the emergency stuff, but we really need some boats. Not trawlers—we’re commandeering some big freighters now—but gunboats. We need a full four to make it out to the island okay.”

“I can understand that,” I replied, “but I’ve only got the four here myself.”

“We need one of ’em,” he told me matter-of-factly. “We’re also pulling one each from two other companies along the coast here. You’ll have to make do with three.” It wasn’t a request but a command.

I sighed. “All right. But I’m responsible for those boats and crews and I don’t like the idea of a high-risk bork area being worked by four crews unused to each other.” I pretended to think for a moment. “Look, for your safety as well as ours, why not do this instead? Pull all four of my boats and crews off—that is, let Hroyasail take over entirely from Emyasail. We’ll use your surviving Emyasail boat and the other two to fill in here. The Emyasail skipper knows the territory around here, and putting three crews from three spots into a routine trawling and protection operation is a lot safer than cargo.”

He considered my suggestion. “Makes sense,” he admitted. “In fact I’ll recommend it if you and your crews check out okay.”

My eyebrows went up. “Check out? Come on, Mr. Bogen. You’re a security man. You’ve already checked us out.”

He smiled and gave a slight shrug. “Well, yes. Your boats and crews check out nicely, I admit. You, however, are a question mark to me, Mr. Zhang. You don’t fit. You don’t quite add up to me. Your psychological profile feels funny. I have the funny feeling I should take the rest of Hroyasail and not you.”

“What! I don’t understand.”

“Don’t ask me why. It’s just a gut feeling. Still, my gut feelings are often correct. Besides, we don’t really need you, you know.”

This guy was good. I hadn’t quite counted on this and I had to make some split-second decisions on him based on risky and incomplete data.

“Look,” I said. “What do you think I am? A Confederacy spy or something? You have my old records.”

“Yes, we do. And more completely than you can believe. We find your whole personality and profile too much at variance from Qwin Zhang’s to dismiss.” Then he thought for a moment, as if wrestling with himself, while I suppressed my rising tension. Damn Security for that sex switch! First Dumonia, now the infinitely more dangerous Bogen, smelled a rat because of it.

“Tell you what,” he said at last. “I don’t know your game, Zhang, nor whether you’re who or what you say you are. But I’ll admit I’m curious—and more than curious, I’m interested. So I’m going to take a mild risk and let you come along. What throws me is that your current profiles indicate a strong, almost overriding attachment to your wife, and she to you. That’s enough of a lever for now.”

I relaxed, pleased that I hadn’t had to play any trump cards at this point and take some real risks. “When do you want us to move down?”

“Day after tomorrow,” he told me. “Brief your crews, then switch over your computer nets.” He stood up and again shook my hand. “I don’t know why, but I have the feeling this is going to be very, very interesting.”

I nodded. “Somehow I think so, too, Mr. Bogen. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do. I want to brief my crews this afternoon and make the adjustments with Tooker.”

“The day after tomorrow, then, at Emyasail.” And he was gone.

I sighed, and didn’t like the vibrations I got from Bogen at all. I think I knew the final step he’d taken in deciding to invite me along, and it was another one of those gut feelings. We had stared into each other’s eyes—and seen each other there. One good pro always deserves another. That would mean that he’d be out to get me, perhaps out to give me enough rope.

One against one, Bogen, I thought, feeling better than I should. With the best man winning.

Moving down was no real problem since we were taking only the gunboats and the administrative staff. The layout was similar to the one we had, except the upstairs offices weren’t in very good shape and hadn’t been used for more than storage for some time. Dylan threw herself into getting the place into at least reasonable shape, although for the first week we felt more as if we were camping out than being in familiar surroundings, cooking over a small portable stove and sleeping on a mattress on the floor. “I offered to get her some help, but she was determined to do everything herself and seemed to really enjoy it.

One major change was the large number of scanning machines you had to pass through to go just about anywhere. We all had to have new imprints taken for the benefit of the security system. I had no intention of trying that security system. I was in the big leagues here, and the schemes that had brought me to this point were no longer valid. Bogen would have me under a microscope, and I had no intention of giving him an opening unless it was on my terms. A dozen lives had already been spent getting me here; I felt a strong sense of responsibility to those innocents to do what I had been sent here to do. I owed them at least that.

Dylan suspected I had somehow engineered my way here. Hell, she more than suspected—she had worked with me before and had given me the initial information about it. Only her feeling that I would not deliberately cause the deaths of any innocents kept the peace. I had no intention of ever telling her differently.

One of the first things I had to do, though, was check the torpedoes still in the weapons warehouse against my little list of serial numbers. None of my old numbers were still there, but since we’d come down with a full load of our own in our boats I felt safe.

The stuff we ferried out to the island varied from the usual stuff—food, general electronic and maintenance supplies, that sort of thing—to major communications and computer links and lots of biolab stuff. The fact that so much was still going out, along with an occasional new face from one of the corporations, told me that Laroo wasn’t having a lot of success with Project Phoenix. Still, though I was allowed to ride the boats out to the island and back, I had not been permitted off the island dock and was closely watched at all times when I went over. The strange, futuristic structure in the center appeared even more imposing close up, but that was as near as I could get.

I kept going through everything I knew or had surmised or deduced and what I was seeing, though, and I understood the dead end I was at. Merely having access to the island dock wasn’t enough, but even if I managed to sneak in I’d be caught in short order, as would anybody else I might send.

“I’m frustrated,” I admitted to Dylan one day. “I’m at a dead end, and I can’t figure out any way to proceed. I’ve been here a year now and I’ve accomplished a great deal—but now I’m stuck. The most frustrating thing is to be this close to all of it and not be able to move.”

“You’re still bent on killing Laroo, aren’t you?” she responded. “I wish I could help you, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t. You know I can’t be a party to taking a human life.”

I nodded and squeezed her hand. “I know. Still, killing isn’t my major objective. I want to find out about those robots. I don’t like the idea of a legion of those things, all under Laroo and Bogen and perhaps the others of the Four Lords, unleashed on the Confederacy. Those things are so perfect they scare the hell out of me. If they could negate the obedience programming, that would in and of itself create a new form of life, human-looking but not at all human. Imagine such people able to think with the speed of a super-computer, literally able to control every ‘cell’ of their bodies, to give them whatever they want—the ability to fly, to survive in a vacuum, and all the rest. People like that mentally reduced to great super-computers in human form with only one drive, their own ultimate drive—power. They’d be nearly immortal, too—and if they ever did have problems or wanted a new shape or mass, they would just return here and take on a new one.”

“Surely the Confederacy could track them down and destroy them!”

“Maybe. I keep remembering that one of them got into the most absolutely secure area of the Confederacy, survived all the traps and both human and robot security personnel, and was caught and destroyed in the end only because its programming demanded that it report back to the Warden Diamond. It was basically a senior clerk! Put the best, the crookedest, the nastiest minds of the Warden Diamond in those forms and—well, Dr. Dumonia suggested that the Confederacy was fragile, continuing to be a success mostly because it had never met a real challenge to it These people alone would be a challenge. Put them together with a sophisticated alien culture and it could very well be the end of all we know. I’ve got to stop him, Dylan.”

“You’re sure he can do it, then? Did you ever think that maybe these aliens are advanced enough so that the tools simply aren’t available here to get around their creations?”

I thought it over. “The Four Lords’ reach goes far beyond the Warden Diamond. Although trapped here themselves, they have powerful people all over the Confederacy in their pockets.”

“But would they dare it? I mean, they know the Confederacy knows about their robots, right? And Laroo can’t risk tipping the aliens off, either, to what he’s doing. Doesn’t the fact that he’s doing the research here rather than having it carried on outside show that he doesn’t want to risk getting anybody outside involved?”

“I think you may be right,” I told her. “Okay, let’s make a few assumptions based on what we know. First, the work’s being done here. Second, despite unlimited Cerberan—and maybe Diamond—resources, and the best scientific minds around, he hasn’t been able to crack it yet. The Four Lords are also in a bind: they risk the intervention of the Confederacy, and they also are risking relations with their allies.” I leaned over and kissed her. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe they can’t solve their problem without outside help, and they can’t get that help.”

We sat there silent for a while as I considered all my options and all my possibilities. What did I know, and what didn’t I know?

I wanted to get on the island and into the project. If in fact it was a project of the Four Lords rather than just Laroo’s, as seemed likely, knocking off Laroo wouldn’t matter a bit in the long run. Bogen or somebody else in this highly organized society would simply slip in and keep things going.

So what, then, did I really want to accomplish? I wanted the project abandoned, at least for now. I wanted to be in a position to change this rotten world a little, make it more human, while at the same time protecting what was important to me. Most important, I wanted to wind up a good guy to the Cerberans, to the Four Lords, and to the Confederacy all at the same time.

The idea floated in and I grabbed it, turned it first this way, then that, then decided it was so crazy it couldn’t possibly work—just like the first one. I would have to be right on a lot of close, perhaps uncallable calls, 100 percent of the way. If I was wrong just once in this whole thing I was a dead duck.

“Dylan?”

“Yes, Qwin?”

“Suppose—now just suppose—that there was a way to put a stop to this, at least for now. Put a stop to it, cause a minor revolution that would change Cerberus to a more open and humane society, and put us on top of it?”

“You’re getting crazy again. I can see it”

I nodded. “But suppose all that was possible—and if everything worked, we would kill no one, not even Wagant Laroo?”

She laughed. “Are the odds as bad as the Tooker operation?”

“Worse. I would estimate that right up to the end, to the very last second, the odds would be five to one for discovery, double-cross, or even death. The odds of the whole thing coming off might be a hundred to one, or a thousand to one, or even worse. Depending on where and when things go wrong, it could mean anything from packing up and forgetting all about it through a really nasty judgment to death or Momrath, which is much the same thing. The risks start the moment I put the plan into operation, and after that it might not be stoppable.”

She looked at me with that puzzled fascination she’d shown in the past, a flash of the old Dylan indeed. “I know you want to do it anyway. What’s stopping you?”

I drew her to me. “You don’t know?”

She sighed. “The alternatives, I guess, should be considered. If you don’t do it, you’ll wonder about it for all time, and if anything really terrible like what you were saying qomes to pass, you’ll never forgive yourself. I’m not sure I could, either. I don’t know much about your Confederacy or what it’s like outside or even on other Warden worlds, but sometimes I think we’re the last two really true human beings around.”

“But what about you?” I responded gently. “It might be the end of all this.”

“Then it’s the end. If we continue the way we are, our relationship will be hollow anyway. I’ll have kids and they’ll be taken away, as always. And they aren’t very likely to lift my judgment, so in twenty years or so I’ll be ready for Momrath or whatever it is they do to the expendables. What kind of life is that?” She stared seriously into my eyes. “You go ahead—and if my psych blocks won’t interfere, include me in. You understand? If anything goes wrong, and it probably will, I don’t want to keep going. One big gamble for the two of us. Everything we want—or we go out together.”

I grabbed her and pulled her to me and kissed her long and hard, and we made love as if it might be the last time we would ever have the chance.

The final, the ultimate scam was about to begin.