Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

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.

It may seem like a strange life, going about not knowing where you have been or what you’ve done, but it has its compensations. Because any potential enemy, military or political, knows you’ve been wiped, you can live a fairly normal, relaxed life outside of a mission structure. There’s no purpose in coming after you—you have no knowledge of what you’ve done or why or for whom. In exchange for those blanks, an agent of the Confederacy lives a life of luxury and ease, with an almost unlimited supply of money and with all the comforts supplied. They have sensors in you that they constantly monitor and decide when you need a good refresher. I often wondered just how sophisticated those sensors were. The idea of having a whole security staff see all my debauchery and indiscretions used to worry me, but after a white I learned to ignore it The life offered in exchange is just too nice. Besides, what could I do about it, anyway?

But when a mission came up it wasn’t practical to forgo all the past experience you’d had. A wipe without storage simply wouldn’t have been very practical, since a good agent gets better by not repeating his mistakes. So in the Security Clinic they kept everything you ever experienced on tap, and the first thing you did was go and get the rest of you put back so you would be whole for whatever they’d dreamed up this time.

It always amazed me when I got up from that chair with my past fully restored. Even the clear memories of the things I’d done always amazed me—I of all people had done this or that. The only difference this time, I knew, was that the process would be taken one step further. Not only would the complete me get up from that table, but the same memory pattern would be impressed on other minds, other bodies—as many as needed until a take was achieved.

I wondered what they’d be like, those four other versions of myself. Physically different, probably—the kind of offenders they got here weren’t usually from the civilized worlds, where people had basically been standardized in the name of equality. No, these people would come from the frontier, from the traders and miners and freebooters that existed at the edge of expansion. They were certainly necessary in an expanding culture, since a high degree of individuality, self-reliance, originality, and creativity was required in the dangerous situations in which they lived.

The damned probe hurt like hell. Usually there was just some tingling, then a sensation much like sleep, and I woke up a few minutes later in the chair, myself once again. This time the tingling became a painful physical force that seemed to enter my skull, bounce around, then seize control of my head. It was as if a giant fist had grabbed my brain and squeezed, then released, then squeezed again in excruciating pulses. Instead of drifting off to sleep, I passed out.

I woke up and groaned slightly. The throbbing was gone, but the memory was still all too current and all too real. It was several minutes, I think, before I found enough strength to sit up.

The old memories flooded back as usual, and again I amazed myself by recalling my past exploits. I wondered if my surrogate selves would get similar treatment, considering they couldn’t be wiped after this mission. That realization caused me to make a mental note that those surrogates would almost certainly have to be killed if they did receive my entire memory pattern. Otherwise, a lot of secrets would be loose on the Warden Diamond, many in the hands of people who’d know just what sort of use to make of them. No sooner had I had that thought than I had the odd feeling of wrongness. I looked around the small room in which I’d awakened and realized immediately the source of that feeling.

This wasn’t the Security Clinic, wasn’t anyplace I’d ever seen before. A tiny cubicle, about twelve cubic meters total, including the slightly higher than normal ceiling. In it was a small cot on which I’d awakened, a small basin and next to it a standard food port, and in the wall, a pull-down toilet That was it. Nothing else—or was there?

I looked around and spotted the most obvious easily. Yes, I couldn’t make a move without being visually and probably aurally monitored. The door was almost invisible and there was certainly no way to open it from inside. I knew immediately what sort of room I was in.

It was a prison cell.

Far worse than that, I could feel a faint vibration that had no single source. It wasn’t irritating; in fact it was so dim as to be hardly noticeable, but I knew what it was. I was aboard a ship, moving somewhere through space. I stood up, reeling a bit from a slight bout of dizziness that soon passed, and looked down at my body. Looked down—and got what I think is the greatest shock of my life.

A woman’s body. A Confederacy-standard woman at that. At that moment a tremendous shock and revulsion ran through me. First and foremost I was most solidly and assuredly male and liked things that way, but, worse, that body told me the most horrible of facts. I was not the original but a surrogate. I’m one of them! I thought in sheer panic. I sat back down on the cot, telling myself that it just wasn’t possible… I knew who I was, remembered every bit, every detail of my life and work.

The shock gave way to anger and frustration. Not only was this female body foreign to me and my personality, but that very mind and personality wasn’t real but a copy, an imitation of somebody else entirely, somebody still around, alive, possible monitoring my every move, perhaps my every thought. I hated him then, hated him with a pathological force beyond reason. He would sit there comfortable and safe, in his man’s body, watching me work, watching me do it all—and, when the mission was over, he’d go home for debriefing, return to that easy life, while I—

They were going to dump me on a world of the Warden Diamond, trap me like some kind of master criminal, imprison me there, hold me there for the rest of my life—of this body’s life, anyway. And then? When my job was done? I’d said it myself upon awakening—passed my own sentence. The things I knew! I would be monitored at all times, of course. Monitored and killed if I blew any of those secrets. Killed in any event at the completion of the assignment just for insurance’s sake.

Well, I told myself, the system worked both ways. I knew how he thought, how they thought. This monitoring worked both ways. I was going to be a tough son of a bitch to kill. No, I thought, suddenly morose once more, not son. Did I in fact want to live the rest of my life in this body? I really didn’t know. Not now, certainly—and not ever, deep down. And yet the tiniest of suspicions rested in the back of my mind that my attitude might be just what they had in mind. The perfect double trap for me. If that was the case, they were mistaken. If I began believing for one minute that they did this to me just so I wouldn’t want to outlive my mission, I’d live a thousand years just to spite them. There was probably no such plot, though, I knew. Either they had an ulterior motive having to do with the mission that caused this, or they just didn’t consider it one way or the other. I wished I knew.

But what about now, in any event? For now I’d bide my time, hold my peace, and adjust as best I could. Odd, in a way, how very ordinary and normal I felt. Arms, legs, head, all in the same places. A lot lighter in weight, yes, but that was relative; and being a little weaker in the arms wasn’t anything you really noticed, particularly not in a barren prison cell. Only occasionally did I feel protrusions where none had been before, or the lack of some thing that had always been there. I knew here in an isolated cell I wouldn’t be aware of the differences. Only later, down there, on whatever hellhole they dumped me, around lots of other people—then things would get rough.

I was very dry after waking and located a small water tap and cup in the wall just above the basin. I drank a good deal. Naturally, it went right through me, whereupon I discovered that having to piss was the same feeling only I now had to do it sitting down. I pulled down the toilet and sat and relieved myself—and got yet another shock…

The thing worked by skin contact—don’t ask me how. I’m not one of the tech brains. It was not as good as a neural program, but it allowed them to talk to me in total privacy, even send me pictures only I could see and hear.

“I hope by now you are over the initial shock of who and what you are,” Krega’s voice came to me, so loud and clear it seemed impossible that none of the monitors could hear. “As you recall, the Merton Process of personality transfer is rather wasteful of bodies—roughly thirty die for one take, as it were—and of the first four that did take, one was this woman. We decided to use her for several reasons. She will put any Warden authorities off their guard if there’s been any sort of leak about you, and Cerberus, the planet to which you are being sent, has unique properties that make your sex and age totally irrelevant. To calm you down, I suspect, I should tell you right off that Cerberans enjoy a natural form of the Merton Process—in fact we got the process partially by studies on Cerberus. In other words, you can expect to change bodies once or often down there, as well as sex, age, and all the rest.”

I gave a half-startled cry at this thought and stood up, causing the toilet to flap back into the wall and flush. It worried me for a moment that I might have wiped the briefing; but because my old professional self was re-emerging, I knew that I would have to wait before finding out just to ward off any suspicion by my unseen jailers.

I walked back to the cot and sat down once again, but my mood had abruptly changed. Body switchers. That changed everythingl I was suddenly alive again, alive and excited.

I’d had some nasty shocks, but the worst one was merely temporary. The other—the discovery that I wasn’t who I thought I was but some artificial creation—was still there. The old life, the life I remembered even though I really hadn’t personally experienced it, was gone forever. No more civilized worlds, no more casinos and beautiful women and all the money I could spend. And yet, as I sat there, I adjusted. That was why they’d picked me from the start. My ability to adjust and adapt to almost anything.

Memory, thought, personality—those were the individual, not the body that intelligence wore. / was still mel This was no different than a biological disguise of a particularly sophisticated sort As to whom was really me—it seemed to me that this personality, these memories, were no more that other fellow’s than-my own. Until I got up from that chair back at the Security Clinic I’d really been somebody else anyway. A lot of me, my memories and training, had been missing. That old between-missions me was the artificial one, the created me. He, that nonentity playboy that presently did not exist, was the artificial personality. The real me was bottled up in storage in their psychosurgical computers and allowed to come out only when they needed it—and for good reason. Unlocked, I was as much a danger to the power structure as I was to whoever they set me against.

And I was good. The best, Krega had called me. That’s why I was here, now, in this body, in this cell, on this ship. And I wouldn’t be wiped this time—and now I was sure I would not permit them to kill me, either. Suddenly I no longer felt hatred toward that other me out there someplace. In fact I found I could no longer feel much of anything for him at all. When this was all over he’d be wiped once more—perhaps killed himself if my brother agents on the Diamond and I found out too much. At best he’d return to being that stagnant milquetoast. Not me. I’d still be here, still live on, the real one. A whole person. I would be more complete than he would.

I was under no illusions, though. Kill me they would, if they could, if I didn’t do their bidding. They’d do it automatically, by robot satellite and without qualms. But my vulnerability would only last a short time—even less on Cerberus than elsewhere, since they would have to find out who I was as well and without the aid of biotracers or any other physiological gadget. I wondered how they were going to get me to report. I remembered Krega saying something about a thing implanted in the brain, but the moment I switched bodies that was useless. Probably there was some deep psychocommand to report, perhaps with the aid of agents or paid accomplices on Cerberus. I would get to that matter when I could. Until then, I’d do their dirty work for them. I had no choice, as they undoubtedly knew. During that vulnerable stage—who knew how long?—I was their property. After—well, we’d see.

The thrill of the challenge took over, as it always did. The puzzle to be solved, the objectives to be accomplished. I liked to win, and it was even easier when you felt nothing about the cause, just the challenge of the problem and the opponent and the physical and intellectual effort needed to meet that challenge. Find out about the alien menace. The outcome no longer concerned me directly, since I would be trapped on a Warden world from now on. If the aliens won the coming confrontation, the Wardens would survive as allies. If they lost—well, it would only maintain the status quo. This reduced the alien question to an abstract problem for me and made my situation perfect.

The other assignment created a similar situation. Seek out the Lord of Cerberus and kill him if I could. In a sense doing so would be more difficult, since I’d be operating on unfamiliar ground and would therefore require time and possibly allies; Another challenge. If I get him, I’d only increase my power and position on Cerberus. If he got me instead, then I wouldn’t give a damn because I’d be dead. But the thought of losing is abhorrent to me. That set the contest in the best terms, from my point of view. Track-down assassination was the ultimate game, since you won or you died and never had to live with the thought that you’d lost.

It suddenly occurred to me that the only real difference that probably existed between me and this Lord of the Diamond was that I was working for the law and he—or she—against it. But no, that wasn’t right, either. On his world he was the law and I would be working against it. Perfect again. Dead heat on moral grounds.

The only thing that really bothered me was the disadvantage of not having a psychoprogram with everything I needed to know all neatly laid out for me in my mind. Probably, I thought, they hadn’t done it this time because they’d had me on the table in four new bodies with four separate missions, and the transfer process to a new body was hard enough without trying to add anything afterward. Still, the omission put me in a deep pit. I sure hoped that the rest of that contact briefing recording hadn’t wiped when I’d gotten up. It would be all I had.

Food came—a hot tray of tasteless muck with a thin plastic fork and knife that would dissolve into a sticky puddle in an hour or so, then dry up into a talclike powder. Standard for prisoners.

This being my first meal in some time, it wasn’t long before I had to go once again, and so I faced convincingly my moment of truth with the toilet that talked.

“Now, as to this process”—Krega’s voice, picking up right where we left off, gave me a tremendous feeling of relief—“we had to brief you this way because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Don’t worry about it, though—it’s permanent. We just prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock. Besides, we haven’t the time to allow you to completely ‘set in,’ as it were. This will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel you have the trickiest task of the four.”

I felt the old thrill creep in. The challenge… the challenge!

“As I said, your objective world is Cerberus. Like all the Diamond colonies, Cerberus is a madhouse. Third out from the Warden sun of the four Warden worlds, it is subject to seasons and ranges from a tropical equatorial zone to frozen polar caps. The most peculiar thing from a physical standpoint about the world is that it is a water world with no above-surface land masses. It is, however, a world abundant in life. The geological history is unknown, but apparently the sea covering was quite stow and the massive numbers of plants in its distant geological past kept their heads above water, so to speak. Thus almost half of the surface is covered with giant plants interwoven into complex networks, some with trunks tens of kilometers around—necessary support, since they are rooted in the seabed from a hundred meters to an impossible two to three kilometers below. The cities and towns of Cerberus are built atop these plants.

“No additional physical descriptions will be adequate, and you will be well briefed below by the governing officials upon landing. However, we feel a complete physical-political map would be useful and are thus going to imprint that map on your mind now.”

I felt a sharp back pain, then a wave of dizziness and nausea that quickly cleared. Whereupon I found that I did in fact have a detailed map of the entirety of Cerberus in my head. It would be very handy. There followed a fast stream of facts on the place. It was roughly 40,000 kilometers around the equator, and its gravity was 1.02 norm, so close I’d hardly notice it. Equatorial and summer temperatures were a pleasant 26 to 27 degrees centigrade, mid-latitude spring and fall were between 12 and 13 degrees centigrade, chilly but not uncomfortable, and polar regions and mid-latitude winters could drop as low as 25 below, although the sea cover and the location of settlements along warm currents that the great plants also followed usually kept it well above that and relatively ice-free even in the worst of times.

A day was 23.65 standard hours, close enough to cause no major disruptions in my biological schedule, a pretty normal environment—if you liked water, anyway.

Cerberus was industrialized—I could hardly wait to see factories in the treetops—but lacked heavy metals or easily obtainable hard resources of any sort. Most of its ore and other needed industrial materials came from Medusa in exchange for finished goods, and from mines on the many moons of a gas giant much farther out. While technological, the Confederacy kept close tabs on what was built on Cerberus, and the industry, though good, was forcibily kept in obsolete channels. In effect this was the best of news, since there wouldn’t be a machine on Cerberus I didn’t know intimately or couldn’t get complete details on from above. To ensure some technological retardation, there was the Warden organism, whose fancy name nobody used or remembered. It got into literally everything, right down to the molecules in a grain of sand, and it resisted “imported” materials—that is, materials that did not also have Warden organisms inside. Thanks to early exploration spreading the contagion from Lilith, this meant not only the four Warden worlds but, to my surprise, the seven barren but mineral-rich moons of the ringed giant Momrath, outside the zone of life. For some reason the Warden bug could still live were no others could, even way out there, but no further. Beyond Momrath the things died as they did going out-system.

“The Lord of Cerberus is Wagant Laroo,” Krega’s voice went on. “He was an important Confederacy politician until about thirty years ago, when he grew too ambitious and forgot his sacred oaths, taking his sector from the paths of civilization into his own private kingdom. As befitted his position and former contributions to the Confederacy, he was given the option of death or Warden exile; he chose the latter. He is a megalomaniac with delusions of godhood, but do not underestimate bun. He has one of the most brilliant organizational minds the Confederacy ever produced, and it is coupled with total amorality and absolute ruthlessness. His power and rule extend far beyond Cerberus, for many antisocials within the Confederacy use Cerberus as a storehouse for hidden records, location of loot, and even the storage of blackmail. I fear I must warn you that, if the impossible happened and there was some sort of leak about you, he will know of it. No security is perfect, and this possibility must be considered.”

I nodded to myself. Despite Krega’s patriotic phrasing, few if any top Confederacy politicians were immune to scandal or blackmail on some level, and this guy was a master.

“Finding Laroo might well be impossible,” Krega warned. “Cerberus has the Warden organism, but it is a mutated strain. More of this will be explained on orientation, but you must trust to the fact that bodies are as interchangeable as clothes on Cerberus. So even if you saw Laroo, had him pointed out to you and shook his hand, you could not be absolutely certain it was really he, and even less certain that it would still be he days, hours, even minutes later.”

That didn’t really bother me much. For one thing, if Laroo had this kind of dictatorial control somebody always had to know who he was or he couldn’t give the orders and expect to be obeyed. Furthermore, a man like that would love the actual trappings and exercise of power. Then too, Laroo couldn’t be at all certain who I might be a few minutes, days, or weeks later, either.

“At last count there were approximately 18,700,000 people on Cerberus,” Krega went on. “This is not a large population, but it has a very high growth rate. There are more jobs and space than people even now. Since the advent of Laroo’s rule the population has been expanding at a rate that almost doubles it every twenty years or so. We believe that only part of this population push is economic, though. Much of it, we think, is because, on a world of body switchers, the potential for immortality exists if there is a constant and available supply of young bodies. Laroo seems to have some control over this process, which is the ultimate political leverage. Naturally, this also means that, short of being killed, Laroo could literally rule forever.”

Immortality, I thought, and the idea sounded very pleasant. How long will you live, my other original self? I, sir, had an infinite answer to that one. Perhaps this was not such a terrible assignment after all.

Krega had a lot more routine stuff for me, but finally the lecture was over and I simply got off the John and heard it flush. The next time I used it, I discovered that this time the message had been flushed as well. Because it had been a direct neural transmission, even with the interruption, it had taken only a minute or two for the whole thing.

Efficient, the Security boys, I told myself. Even my ever-vigilant jailers on the other end of those lenses and mikes would have no idea I was anybody other than who I was supposed to be.

As to who I was, that had come in a rush as well. I was Qwin Zhang, forty-one, former freighter loadmaster and expert smuggler, a virtuoso of the computerized loading and inspection system. A technological crook—that fit many of my own skills perfectly.

I lay back on the cot and put myself in a slight trance to better sort out the information I’d received. Qwin did bother me a bit. I could follow her life and career without ever really getting a handle on her. Born and bred to her job, normal Confederacy upbringing, no signs of any deviation from the normal path millions of others followed, the path set out for them from birth that they were not only expected to follow but designed to follow. I mentally followed the steps in her routine life and found nothing unusual, nothing to show what I was looking for.

And yet she stole. Stole expertly, methodically, and efficiently, even using the computer routing systems not only to shave cargo loads but actually to misdeliver them to waiting fencing operations out on the frontier. Stole almost from the start of her career, and so well she was caught only when a freak accident on a freighter with a bit more cargo than it was supposed to have caused a total inventory and alerted Security. She’d been probed and poked and studied, but there seemed little there. She’d stolen because she could, because the opportunity was there. She felt no guilt, no remorse for this “crime against civilization,” and didn’t seem to have any clear idea of what she would one day do with all that money had she gotten away with it.

Where was the corruption point? I couldn’t find it, nor could the psych boys. What dreams had you had, Qwin Zhang? I mused. What event disillusioned you or turned you, from the paths of righteousness? Some exotic love affair? If so, it wasn’t anywhere to be found in what they gave me. Not much interest or history in sex of any sort. Perhaps the answer was there, somewhere in somebody’s sexual theories of abnormal psychology, but it didn’t really show.

Still, she’d been a nonetity. Her crimes depended on that, and such crimes were hidden, never publicized, lest others get ideas. Because she had had a norm body and looks and an average personality, it was unlikely anyone on Cerberus would ever have heard of her. That suited me just fine. The last thing I wanted was to bump into one of her old buddies down there. I wouldn’t have the memories to match.