Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

CHAPTER FOUR Settling In

All but four of us changed bodies during that fourth night. Luck being with me, I was once again young, male, and Confederacy standard, although Bruska didn’t really accept the swap with good grace. They separated all of us quickly to minimize the trauma, and I was assured that good psychs would help those who needed it to adjust.

They did a complete set of tests once again, mostly on the psych side, to determine if any of us not showing severe distress were actually hiding it. Naturally I passed with flying colors. I was overjoyed at my carefully planned result.

I also found that the two most objectionable men had changed with their female partners during that night, which I considered poetic justice. Let them find out how unpleasant men like them could be from the other side; then perhaps if they got to be men again they’d be better and more considerate.

The small ID card was simply placed in a slot. I was told it would work from any slot for it, in stores or even to unlock doors, if you first called the number of the Identity Placement Bureau and told them which slot you were using. Basically, Bruska’s name and computer code were erased from the little chip and mine were placed there. They did a check with the brain-reading machine to make sure all worked okay, and it had, so at last I was given an assignment.

“Tooker Compucorp in Medlam needs programmers,” I was told, “and your experience fits that bill. Two hundred units have been credited to your account compliments of the government, which will be enough to get you there and get you settled. It’s a good company and a good location if you like the tropics. Warm there most of the year.”

And with little more than this and some instructions on how to buy things like clothes and tickets and who to see, I was off.

I found that the little three-pronged gadgets were literally everywhere. To get on the shuttle to Medlam you walked up, put your card in the slot, and put on the little device. If everything checked, the fare was deducted from your account and your card returned to you, and in this case a physical ticket was printed. Very efficient and very simple.

I also found that a number of small purchases worked just with the card—newspapers, confections, that sort of thing.

It was a long ride with a lot of stops and several times I had to keep myself from dozing off—the situation could get serious if somebody else was dozing, too. Fortunately the shuttle had a small food service dispensing system where you could get stimulant drinks, including a Cerberan version of coffee and another of tea, and snacks. I drank a lot of stimulant drinks along the way and needed all of them.

I arrived late in the afternoon, but got a robocab to the Tooker offices anyway on the off-chance that I wouldn’t be too late for that day.

The place was imposing, that was for sure. Glassy windows lined towering tree trunks all around, and in between, cradled like some play treehouse for the impossibly rich, an imposing all-glass-fronted office building that connected to all the vast trunks. This, then, was Tooker.

The main offices had already closed for the day, but the night staff was very cordial and recommended a nearby hotel for the night. The hotel, entirely in a massive trunk, was modern and luxurious inside. Nervously, I called the Central Banking number to see how much I still had left after all this, and was surprised and relieved to find that I still had 168.72 units in my account.

The only unusual thing about the room was that there was a switch in the headboard of the bed with a sign that read: turn before sleeping. I discovered that turning it raised plating around the bed from floor to ceiling, plates of some thin but firm plasticlike substance through which ran metal threads of some sort.

Claustrophobia, then, was a real problem on Cerberus. The shield was obviously there to ensure a good night’s sleep with no unexpected exchanges. I wondered what sort of distance would be the maximum range for a sleep-exchange and decided I’d have to know that. I asked one of the desk employees about it, and he, upon finding I was new, told me that the shields weren’t necessary in the hotel and that almost nobody used them, but they were there because some big shots became paranoid. Although in some cases, an exchange could take place at up to twenty meters, the walls, floor, and ceiling of all rooms were treated to shield. That made me feel a little better, and I didn’t use the shield again that evening.

The room vision monitors were no help, since they seemed composed of years-old bad programming from the civilized worlds and some really horrible and amateurish local programming, but I got a print-out of the local paper and looked it over. Not much there, either—not big-city scope at all; more like the vacuous weeklies produced in some rural areas. The only unique item was a small column back with the classifieds for personals and announcements called “switched,” followed by a double column of names—maybe a dozen pairs. One way to know who your friends really were here, I reflected.

In fact, the ads were the only things of real interest. There was evidently a small but thriving competitive sector on consumer goods allowed between the corporations, assuring a variety of goods at less than totally uniform prices. On the civilized worlds, of course, there were few brands of anything. For example, the best tested and most recommended toothpaste was everybody’s toothpaste, perhaps in three or four flavors, and there were no brands or competition. Here there was, for the first time since I’d been on the frontier, and I found I kind of liked it.

There were also banks, although they were not such full-service institutions as those with which I was familiar. Apparently you could take some of your units out of the master account and place it with a bank at interest, and also borrow money from such banks. There was therefore a semi-independent subeconomy here, and that too was worth noting.

Judging from the want ads, Tooker was the big employer, but many other places also advertised, so some movement was possible on one’s own. The independent merchants advertised a lot for part-time help, too, suggesting some economic disparity and also indicating that, even if the executive offices closed in the late afternoon, Tooker operated around the clock in many divisions.

To my surprise, some churches were listed—in fact, a fair number of them for just about every belief under the sun, including some new to me that sounded pretty bizarre. Also part-time schools to better yourself or your position, lots of the usual stuff like that.

That brought up a point, and I checked the local phone directory. No schools for the young were listed anywhere, nor were there any headings for day care or other services for children or parents. Obviously I still had gaps to fill in for this new culture.

Medlam, being subtropical, seemed to have a number of resorts and tourist-orieiited stuff, including several for “Thrilling Charter Bork Hunts!” whatever a bork was.

Interestingly, nowhere, not in the briefing, not in the guide book, nor anywhere else was there reference to Wagant Laroo. The Lord of Cerberus certainly kept a low profile.

The next day I checked out bright and early and showed up at the Tooker personnel office. They were expecting me and quickly processed me into the corporation. The job was thirty-eight hours a week at 2.75 units per hour, although that could increase up to 9.00 units with seniority in my assistant’s position and even more should I move up. I definitely intended on moving up. I was told, too, that I was a Class I Individual, which was reserved for those with special skills. Class I’s kept the same job regardless of body. Class II’s kept the same job regardless of who was inside the body. There was also a Class III for unskilled workers who could switch jobs if they and their employers agreed—a sort of safety valve, I guessed. Idly I asked what happened if a I and II switched, and was told matter-of-factly that in that case the decision on who did what was made by the government, usually getting judges to switch them back forcibly.

“Take my advice if you’re the kind that likes switching around,” the personnel manager told me. “Switch only with other I’s. It’s simpler and causes no trouble.”

“I doubt if I’ll do much switching in the near future,” I assured him. “Not voluntarily, anyway.”

He nodded. “Just remember the possibilities and guard against them, and you never will switch unless you want to, and then only with whom you want. And when you’re gettin’ older and want a new start—well, that’s up to you. Stay clean, work hard, and make youself indispensable or at least important—that is the best insurance. Make ’em want to give you a new body every thirty years or so. That’s the best way.”

I nodded soberly. “Thanks. Il’l remember that.” Of course I had no intention of settling into a regular routine for that long a time. But I did need some time like that, time to get to know people and get to know the world and the society. Patience is the greatest of virtues if you’re going to subvert a society, and there’s no substitute for preparation.

I would like to say that during the next four months I did all sorts of daring and exciting things, but the truth is that there are only brief moments like that in a job like mine—all the rest is boring, plodding stuff. The corporation provided me with subsidized housing—a comfortable tree-lined flat with full kitchen, air conditioning, and the rest that was quite pleasant. The job they started me at was anything but demanding, and the speed with which I “assisted” designers in improving new circuit designs marked me quickly for bigger and better things, particularly since I was careful to let my superiors take the credit while keeping evidence of who really did the work—evidence they knew about. This put them in my debt without my seeming threatening. I could have hogged full credit and had not. In a word, I was becoming indispensable, at least to the next level above me, like the man said. It was child’s play, actually, since the designs used on Cerberus were a good ten or even twenty years out of date and quite limited in one area. No self-aware computers of any kind were allowed here. That was really the key to retardation in the Warden Diamond, and a clever one on the part of the Confederacy, which was very real, even here. You didn’t have to land or even enter the atmosphere to wipe an entire borough off the face of the planet, and they’d do that as an object lesson if they got wind of any bending of the rules.

In point of fact, that very primitiveness imposed on the planet aided me over many other technological masterminds, since most or all of them were trained and developed on machines too advanced for here. There were very few of us, really, who could do the utmost with the older designs.

I made a number of friends and quickly became a social gadfly. The corporation had a lot of teams competing against other corporate employee teams in just about every sport I knew. After working out regularly and fine-tuning this body I now wore, I excelled at them, as usual, though I was never able to get myself up to the physical peak of my original body.

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.”

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.