Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Creative Psych and Proposition Time

“I still can’t believe you managed it,” Dylan told me on the way over to Dumonia’s. “My God, Qwin! In one year you’ve come here, framed a big shot, become a company president, wormed your way into a high-level security project, and now you’ve even managed to get a judgment reversed—a judgment not too many months old!”

I nodded and smiled, but that dark edge that came in when things were underway and out of control was irrepressible, “Still, we’re only halfway home. The trickiest parts are yet to come, and this guy Laroo really bothers me. Dylan, I looked at him and I knew real fear, real danger. These Four Lords are the best of their kind, an ultimate evolutionary type. The whole Warden Diamond concept was the dumbest thing the Confederacy ever accomplished. I see that now. They put the absolute best, most brilliant criminal psychopaths together on one spot. The survivor of such struggles has to be the perfection of their kind—thoroughly brilliant, totally amoral, totally ruthless. He thought of every way to screw me up just while I was sitting there, and I think he knows, or at least suspects, what I’m up to.”

“But you talked yourself out of his traps,” she pointed out, “and he went along with you. If he’s that good, why did he?”

“I think I know. Consider his position. His biggest weakness is his fear that at any moment his enormous and growing power may be snuffed out. It was already a fear before, but now that one of the Four Lords is gone, it has become an obsession. He has the best minds on Cerberus working on his ultimate solution—including Merton, who may be one of the best minds in that area, period. And they can’t crack it. He needs Project Phoenix. So even figuring on a double-cross of some kind, he’s willing to let me go ahead anyway. He has no choice. The only thing he can do is let me go all the way, using Merton and the others to uncover my tricks, in the hopes that I’ll still solve the problem for him. It’s the ultimate challenge, Dylan. He’s betting his ego against mine that he can outfox me before I can outfox him.”

“You’re sure he knows you’re planning something?”

I nodded. “He knows. Like Bogen said, you get a gut feeling, pro to pro. Like the gut feelings you relied on most heavily in the bork hunts. He knows simply because of the bottom line. Once I deliver, he has everything to fear from me and nothing to gain by keeping me around. We both understand that. He knows I’ll have to pull something, and he is betting he can figure it out. That’s why the free leash right now, the giving in to my conditions. It doesn’t matter—as long as I deliver the goods.”

She looked at me. “Can you deliver?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t the slightest idea. That’ll be up to Otah and my brother and Krega and those above him. In the end, I have to bet on their being able to come up with the solution to the problem.”

She just nodded and turned and looked back out the window of the helicab.

Soon we arrived at Dumonia’s offices and were quickly ushered in. Laroo had wasted no time in setting all this up, since he saw assassins in every corner. He was probably right.

Dumonia, too, seemed impressed. While Dylan was off with the thirteen judges assembled on Laroo’s orders just for this purpose, we sat, relaxed, and talked. I liked Dumonia, although I didn’t trust him.

“Well, so you blew the lid off your cover,” he noted casually.

I nodded. “Why not? It was always shaky anyway. And frankly, if you knew, it’d eventually get out in any event.”

He winced. “Am I that disreputable?”

“For all I know, you’re exactly what you seem to be. Or you could be Wagant Laroo himself. On this world, who can tell?”

He found the idea amusing. “That’s the most common problem we face, you know, here on Cerberus. Paranoia. Fear of who’s who. It’s the thing that keeps the people in line. We have a really nasty element in our population, courtesy of the Confederacy, but it takes something like that to keep us as peaceful and relatively crime-free as we are. That and the threat of a judgment, or death, if caught. I suspect that that’s why I love this place so much. Think of the business!”

I had thought a lot about Svarc Dumonia over the past several weeks, and had been extra careful even in choosing him. The man was a total contradiction—a totally amoral, cynical person with criminal tendencies in the mass and abstract sense, yet totally devoted to helping and curing his individual patients.

“Just your idea that I might be Laroo is a good example,” he said. “Total paranoia reigns. But I’m not Laroo. I couldn’t ever be Laroo, for the very simple reason that I hate governments. I hate all institutions, from the Confederacy to the Cerberan government to the local medical society. Organized anthills, all of ’em. Designed to stifle and straitjacket the individual human spirit, and doing a damned good job as well. Religions are just as bad, maybe worse. Dogma. You have to believe this; you have to behave like that. Run around wasting time in silly rituals instead of being productive. You know we have a hundred and seventy different faiths in Medlam alone? Everything from the Catholic Church and Orthodox Judaism—consider the problems with sex changing, circumcision, and the rest they face in our changeable world—to local nut cults that believe the gods are sleeping inside Cerberus and will awaken to take us to the Millennium someday.”

“You’re an anarchist, then.”

“Oh, I suppose. A comfortable, upper-class anarchist, a sort, wearing tailored suits and having a seaside resort home I can get to in my private flier. That’s where the old philosophers went wrong, you know. Anarchism isn’t the way for the masses. Hell, they want to be led, or they wouldn’t keep tolerating and creating all these new bureaucratic institutions to tell them what to think. It’s an individual philosophy. You compromise, becoming as much of an anarchist as you can without worrying about man in the collective. The only thing you can do in the collective sense is to shake them up periodically, give ’em a revolutionary kick in the pants. It never lasts—it creates its own dogmas and bureaucracies. But theshake-up is healthy. When the Confederacy got so institutionalized that even a little revolt here and there was impossible, that’s when dry rot set in.”

I began to see where he was heading. “And you think I’m a local revolutionary?”

“Oh, you’ll probably get your fool head blown off, but maybe you’ll give ’em a kick. Eventually you’ll become what you destroy even if you succeed, but then some new smart ass will come along and do the same to you. It’ll keep the juices flowing for the long run.”

I accepted that. I liked Dumonia, although not necessarily all that he said or believed. I certainly couldn’t see myself as another Laroo and said so.

“But you are,” he responded. “You told me you felt real apprehension and fear when you met him. Know why? Because you looked at Laroo and knew, deep down, that you were looking at yourself. Knew that you were looking straight into the eyes of somebody whose mind worked just like yours.”

“I don’t worship power.”

“Because you’ve never had that degree of power, so you can’t really imagine what it might do to you. But you do love it. Every time you took on an opponent, a system, something, and won, you exercised power and demonstrated your mastery over those people, that system.”

“I hope not. I sincerely hope you’re wrong. But tell you what. In the incredibly unlikely event that I ever get to be Lord of Cerberus, I’ll continue to see you often just to have you kick me in the rear. How’s that?”

He didn’t laugh. “No, you won’t. You won’t like, or will choose not to believe, what I tell you, and you’ll eventually grow sick of it. I know. You see, twenty years ago I had almost this identical conversation with Wagant Laroo.”

“What!”

He nodded. “I’ve seen ’em come and go. I helped put him in, and I’ll help put you in if I can, but nothing will change.”

“How do you stay alive, Doc?”

He grinned. “My little secret. But remember, everybody now running this place has at one time or another been a patient of mine.”

“Including me,” I muttered, more to myself than him. I suddenly realized that here in this office was truly the smartest, most devious man on Cerberus—and oddly, not one to be feared, at least yet. Dumonia could have been Lord any time he wanted, but he didn’t want it. Running a place was against his religion.

“Well, let’s get on to more direct matters,” I suggested, feeling more and more uncomfortable. “You said that if Dylan were out of judgment you might effect a complete cure. Well, that’s going to be the case. Now, what needs to be done?”

He assumed a more professional tone. “Frankly, the easiest thing to do is to stop here and let it ride. The safest, too. She’s quite a bit better now. She knows who she is and what she is and understands herself pretty well. Most of her old personality is back, and some of the confidence, too. The remaining block is that she’s scared deep down of losing you. If not now, then years down the pipe. Not by violence, which seems likely—she could accept that, I think. She lived with friends and co-workers dying for five years. But, well, losing your heart, so to speak. There’s really only one way to show her it’s a groundless fear, and it involves tremendous risk to both of you.”

“I’m rolling for all the marbles now, Doc,” I told him. “What’s a little more risk at this stage?”

He sat back, thinking. “All right. You’ve heard of Cerberan-induced schizophrenia? A misnomer, by the way, since it not only has nothing to do with schizophrenia, it doesn’t even have any related symptoms.”

“I’m not really sure,” I told him honestly.

“Well, in very rare, freak instances during the personality transfer process, we wind up with one of two very strange conditions. If we can control the transference between two minds and interrupt it at a precise spot, the data from both minds will be present equally in both brains, so to speak. We have more than enough room in there, you know. The two primary results are either eventual merging of the two into one new personality after a period of acute identity, crisis, or winding up with two complete, distinct personalities in each body, alternating. Timing, mental and physical setup, and the like, is crucial and not guaranteed.”

“I think I remember hearing something about it. Early on, in the briefings after I came.”

He nodded. “Very rare—but we can do it in the lab. The problem is that every individual is physically different, and the time tolerances are incredibly fine to get any result, let alone the desired one. And there’s very little margin for error. We’ve occasionally been able to get the splits to merge, but that’s about it. The process is irreversible and permanent.”

“And just what does this have to do with Dylan?”

“Well, barring the discovery of mental telepathy in practical form, the only way to reassure her totally—if you really are sincere and her fears are groundless—is to try something akin to this process. Control it, and stop the transference just short of the induced split. This will put a strong imprint from the other person in each mind. It’ll be as if you could read each other’s innermost thoughts and secrets—which is why almost nobody has the guts to try it. No more secrets, period. None. But if timed correctly, it’ll fade over a period of weeks, leaving only the original personality and the ultimate memory of knowing the other. If we could do this with the two of you, she would know, would have been inside your head so to speak, and there would be no more doubting you—if you really don’t, deep down, give cause for the doubt. For a brief time, a few days at least, she would have total access to your mind, memories, and personalities inside her own head—and you, hers.”

I whistled. “That’s a pretty nasty load. Do I even know myself what I really want or feel?”

“Yes. You see the risk. And there’s the additional one. To be really effective, the timing is crucial, and as I said, individual factors not all quantifiable come into play, making it an educated guess. Split or merger is a very real possibility.”

“I see. And what are the odds of something going wrong like that?”

“Fifty-fifty, frankly.”

I sighed. “I see. And, just on the off-chance I still wanted this, and Dylan was willing too, how much prep time would you need? How much notice?”

“At least a day. Several weeks would be better, since I’d have to cancel a lot of my appointments, but it’ll be worth it. I haven’t done anything like this in a long, long time.”

“How many times have you done it in your twenty or thirty years of practice?”

He thought a moment. “Four, I think.”

“And how many times did it succeed?”

“Well, that’s relative. Two worked, and two caused the induced state I mentioned. Of the two that worked, one couple became the closest duo I’d ever known, and seemed to almost reach nirvana.”

“And the other?”

“Wound up hating each other’s guts. That was partly my fault. I really didn’t dig deep enough into one of ’em.”

“We’ll have to think about this,” I told him, “It’s a big step. And right now I can’t afford to have anything less than a clear head. It’s a pretty drastic step.”

He nodded. “That’s understandable. But I might mention something that might come in handy, maybe not. The brain-scan devices have a preset pattern they look for, allowing for variances if bodies have been switched in the electrical and chemical requirements of the new body. It’s a points-of-similarity thing, like partial fingerprints. If it gets twenty points of similarity with what’s recorded, it says it’s you. Under any of the induced states, at least for a period of days, the scan machines would recognize those points in either mind. I’ve been playing with that idea for years, but never had a use for it. Maybe you will.”

I looked at him strangely, then had to laugh. “You old anarchist bastard!”

“Things are so bright and clear again,” Dylan told me as we sped away from the office. “You don’t realize how much you see and hear the Warden organisms between people and things until you’re deprived of that contact for the first time in your life. It’s like being blind and then suddenly being able to see again.”

I could only partly understand that. True, I was aware of the things, and you could feel ’em and hear ’em if you concentrated, but they’d become just something that was, something you damped out and never gave a thought to. And that of course may have been what she really meant. You don’t notice the noises of the sea, but if they stopped, you sure would.

“You’ve got to watch yourself now, though,” she warned. “You can wake up automatically inducted into the motherhood some morning.”

I laughed and kissed her. “Don’t worry about it. I can always get my body back if I want to.”

We went on to talk about a lot of things, including Dumonia’s radical ideas.

“You’d be willing to do that?” she asked. “For me?”

“If that was what you wanted and needed,” I assured her. “That is, if we survive the next few days.”

She hugged me. “Then we don’t have to. Just knowing that you would is more than enough for me. Partner.”

“Lover,” I retorted, and hugged her back.

Otah’s shop hadn’t changed at all, nor had Otah himself. He hadn’t seen me in some time, though, and looked surprised and pleased to see me, although less so at the sight of Dylan. Still, he pulled himself up as straight as he could and came over to us.

“Qwin! How delightful! I’d given you up for dead!”

“I’ll bet,” I responded dryly, then gestured with my head to Dylan. “This is my wife, Dylan Kohl.”

“Your wi—Well, I’ll be damned! And to think you two first met here!”

“We didn’t,” Dylan told him. “That was somebody else, same body.”

That news befuddled him a bit, which I took as a good sign. That meant that Otah had no idea, what I had transmitted, or he’d have known of Dylan, Sanda, and the rest. He didn’t listen—or couldn’t.

“Well, what can I do for you two this lovely day?” he asked pleasantly, and I could see that behind that fat face his mind was trying to figure out how to separate the two of us so he could force a report.

“You can can the act, Otah,” I responded, a slight edge in my voice. “I know about the transmissions. I know you get your black-market electronics from the Confederacy somehow in exchange for triggering folks like me.”

He laughed nervously. “Why, Qwinl That’s insane!”

“No, it’s true—and you know it, I know it, even Dylan knows it. Otah, this has grown bigger than you, bigger than the bootleg stuff. I need to call in. I need to call in now, consciously, and with full knowledge and memory of the call. You understand?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about!”

“No more games!” I snapped, “If you want to keep this sham up, fine. There are other sources. But you’ll be long gone to Momrath for inconveniencing me, I promise you. Otah, I’m in the middle of Wagant Laroo’s own circle, including the man himself. One word about your off-planet bootlegging activities and you know what will happen.”

He sputtered and swallowed hard. “You wouldn’t.”

“In a minute. Now, let’s stop this old school uniform stuff, huh? We got to be friends because that was how you got your payoffs. You used me, and that means I can now use you—or discard you. Which will it be?”

He swallowed hard, shook his head, and sighed. “Come on, it was nothing personal, Qwin. You gotta believe that. I always liked you. It was just—well, business.”

“The transceiver, Otah. Let’s get this over with. I can only promise you that if you go along, with no funny business, no one will ever know. But we’re stuck for time. We’re being followed, and I had to get a doctor to remove a couple of small tracking devices placed under our skins without our knowledge. We’re going on a real shopping spree and celebration today, hitting all our old haunts, and you’re one. But if we take too long here, they’ll know.”

He looked around nervously. “Come on in the back, he turned and we followed.

The workshop was the usual mess, out of which he dug a helmetlike device and plugged it into what looked like a test bench console, then turned on the juice.

“Looks something like the brain-scan things—the big stuff,” Dylan noted, and I nodded.

“It probably is something like that. Otah, without saying the magic words, how’s it work?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. The transmission just goes out through the antenna on the roof I use for routine communications. I guess it’s scrambled and picked up somewhere else on Cerberus, then beamed to satellite, and then to who knows where. All I know is you come in, we talk, I wait until we’re alone and say—well, the key words—and you and I walk back, turn the thing on, plug it in. Then you put it on and go into a trance for a couple of minutes. Afterwards you take it off and come back out, and I spot you and make some inane comment and you pick up the conversation from there, just as if you never left.”

I nodded. “Okay, good. Go on back out to the shop until I need you. Dylan can stand watch.”

“Suits me,” he responded nervously, and left.

I looked over the helmet. “It’s a simplified version of a readout used by the Security Clinic,” I told her. “It is something like a scan device, only it transmits the information.”

“I thought that was impossible,” she responded. “Nobody but you would be able to receive it.”

“That’s pretty much correct. Now, don’t get alarmed if I go into that trance. Just let it go. Make a brief appearance out front if you want to—I want no interruptions. When I’m through, we’ll see what’s what.”

“Qwin, who’s on the other end of that thing?”

I sighed. “A computer, probably. Quasi-organic type. And eventually me.”

And so that’s where we stand to date. I hope you will evaluate this information and pass it on to the Operator at this point, rather than waiting for a final report which I will make—if I’m able.

There is a mild pause, like a break in the static. Suddenly a voice—no, not a voice, really, just an impression of one, forms in my mind.

“I will inform him that the report should be read,” the computer says, “but not of its incomplete nature. He will make his own decision.”

“Fair enough,” I tell the computer. “How long?”

“Unknown. He is distraught over the Lilith report and has refused immediate reading of this one. Perhaps a day.”

“How, then, will I get bach into contact? I can’t draw attention to here.”

“We will contact you. Do not worry.”

That’s easy for you to say. You’re only a machine, and you aren’t down here with your neck in a noose.

END TRANSMISSION. READ OUT, HOLD FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

The observer removed the helmet and sank back in the chair, looking and feeling exhausted. He just sat there for several minutes staring at nothing, as if unable to focus his thoughts or get hold of himself.

“You are upset again,” the computer said.

He pointed at nothing. “Is that me down there? Is that really me? Is that me so romantically linked, so crazy and so ambitious?”

“It is you. The verifications and patterns show it so.”

He chuckled dryly. “Yeah. Quantitative analysis. Boil everything down to nice, neat little numbers and symbols. It must be nice to be a computer, not to give a damn that everything you ever thought, ever believed, about yourself and your society is being ripped apart bit by bit, piece by piece.”

“Both of us are the sum of our respective programming,” the computer noted. “Nothing more—or less.”

“Programming! Aw, what’s the use? You’re incapable of understanding this. I wonder if anybody is. Nobody’s ever been put through this before—and shouldn’t be, again.”

“Nonetheless, we have learned much. If the Cerberan unit were to be terminated right now, we would be far ahead. We know now how the robots are programmed. We know that the point of contact between alien and Diamond is inside the orbit of the moons of Momrath. We also are in a position to strike a blow against those robots, even if we have not yet solved the puzzle.”

“I’m not going to recommend frying Cerberus!” he snapped. “Not now, anyway.”

“The station and Laroo’s Island would be sufficient, don’t you think, to put more of a crimp in the operation than even killing one of the Lords, or even all four?”

“Yeah, you may be right. But if I report this, they’re going to recommend taking the whole planet out anyway. As Laroo, I think, pointed out, that might provoke a confrontation—and it would eliminate the robot threat. Without Cerberus, they couldn’t program the things with real minds.”

“Why do you hesitate? Ordinarily you would think nothing of such a step.”

“Why—” He paused, sitting back down. “Yeah, why do I?” he asked himself aloud. “What’s it to me?” That was his training and experience talking, but that was only his intellectual side. There was another side of him, one he had never suspected, that had now revealed itself not once but twice. With Lilith he’d finally convinced himself that it had been an aberration. He was a technological agent, and in a nontechnological society he’d had to change and compromise. But Cerberus? The excuse was gone in that situation. And yet, and yet—had only his twins down there changed?

Still, there was only one thing to do, and he knew it.

“If it makes your decision any easier,” the computer put in, “the elimination of Cerberus would not stop the robot operation, only set it back. As long as any of the Cerberan variant of the Warden organism remained in alien hands it could be used anywhere in-system. We had the indication that it already was being so used. Nor is it yet the time to provoke a confrontation. We have insufficient data yet to get such a resolution through Council for the sector’s elimination. All we might accomplish at this point is a refusal to defend by the enemy, the elimination of the Warden system or its neutralization, and we would then lose all links with the enemy.”

He considered that, and it made sense. “All right. Transmit the proposal and problems to Security Central and get an evaluation and recommendations.”

“Being done,” the computer responded.