Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

PROLOGUE: Beginning of the End Game

There is nothing quite like the sensation of calling your worst enemy up for a friendly little chat. The face appeared on the little screen, although such communication often dispensed with visuals. In this case, both sides were curious to see what the other looked like.

He looked at the face on that screen and understood immediately why everyone who had seen it feared it. It was the handsome face of a man in middle age, trim, lean, and somewhat military, but the eyes got you right away. They seemed hollowed, like a skull’s eyes, yet not empty—they burned with an undefinable something that seemed both eerie and impossible.

“Yatek Morah here,” said the man with the strange eyes. “Who are you and why do you demand to speak to me?”

The man on the other end gave a slight smile. He was on a huge floating city in space, a picket ship and base camp for those who guarded the four prison worlds of the Warden Diamond, a third of a light-year out and beyond the range of the Warden’s own peculiar weapons. “I think you know who I am,” he told Morah.

The strange man’s brow furrowed a bit in puzzlement, but, suddenly, he nodded and gave a slight smile of his own. “So the puppet master is finally out in the open.”

“Look who’s talking!”

Morah gave a slight shrug. “So what is it you wish of me?”

“I’m trying to save a minimum of fifty or sixty million lives—including your own,” he told the man with the burning eyes. “Perhaps a great many more than that.”

Morah’s smile widened. “Are you certain that it is we who are in danger? Or, in fact, that anyone is.”

“Let’s not beat around the bush. I know who you are—at least who and what you claim to be. I have been observing your behavior of late, particularly that in the Castle on Charon. You claim to be Chief of Security for our hidden friends here in the Diamond, and I’m willing to accept you at your word—for now. I certainly hope you’re telling the truth.”

Morah sat back and thought a moment. Finally he said, “It appears you know a great deal indeed. How much do you know?”

“I know why your alien friends are there. I know pretty well where they have to be. I know the nature and purpose of the Warden Diamond and its interesting little beasties. And I know for a fact that your’bosses will fight like hell against any move against the Warden Diamond. Furthermore, I know that my bosses will make just such a move when my report is analyzed. What I don’t know is how strong a resistance your bosses can put up; but they are defending a relatively small position against the resources of an enormous interstellar entity, one which, if you are truly Morah, you know well. In the end, things could become horribly bloody for both sides. Perhaps your bosses could get a number of our worlds and your robots will mess up a hundred more—but we’d get the Diamond. And I mean totally. That means that, no matter what we lose, you and your bosses lose more.”

Yatek Morah remained impassive to the logic, but still appeared interested in the overall conversation. “So what do you propose?”

“I think we should talk. By ‘we’ I mean your bosses and mine. I think we’d better reach some accommodation short of total war.”

“Indeed? But if you know so much, my friend, you must also realize that the very existence of this little exercise came about because my bosses, as you call them, in consultation with our people, determined that the Confederacy can never reach an accommodation with another spacefaring race. So well have our little conference, and both sides will say all the right things, and then we’ll sign some sort of treaty or somesuch guaranteeing this or that; but the Confederacy will not honor that any longer than it feels it has to. They will send in their little missionaries, and they will find that they have come across a civilization so alien that they won’t be able to understand it or its motives.”

“Do you?”

Morah shrugged. “I know and accept them, even if I do not completely understand them. I doubt if any human ever will—nor they us. We are the products of two so totally alien histories that I doubt if even an academic acceptance of one another’s motives and attitudes is possible. On an individual basis, perhaps—on a collective basis, never. The Confederacy simply cannot tolerate something that powerful that is also inscrutably different, particularly with a pronounced technological edge. They would attack, and you know it.”

He made no reply to that, because he could find no flaw in the argument. Morah was simply presenting human history from its beginnings. Such was the nature of the beast—as he should know, being human himself. So instead he changed the subject slightly. “Is there another way? I am in something of a trap myself, you know. My bosses are demanding a report. My own computer analyzer had to be, talked into letting me out the door of my lab to come up here and make a call—and it never would have done so if it thought I was going to call you. When I return, I will have a matter of hours, perhaps a couple of days, to make a report. I will be forced to make it. And then the whole thing will be out of my hands. I am running out of time, and that’s why I’m coming to you.”

“What do you want of me?”

“Options,” he told the strange, powerful man. “Solving your little puzzle was simple. Solving the bigger problem is something beyond me.”

Morah seemed deeply impressed. Still, he said, “You realize that I could prevent you from making that report.”

“Possibly,” he agreed. “But it would do no good. The raw data has already been shifted, and they have a Merton impression of me. They could, with some trouble, go through this entire thing again in a very safe area, and come up with the same report. Besides, I doubt if they would believe I died accidentally—so killing me would tip more of your hand.”

“The problems of killing you safely and convincingly are hardly insurmountable, but what you say is true. Doing so would buy very little time. But I’m not certain you do have the total picture. It would be a pity to sacrifice the Warden Diamond, but only a local tragedy. You have failed to consider all the implications of what you have learned. And, it is true, things are iffy should that happen. But there is at least a forty-percent chance that such an outcome would not adversely affect my bosses’ plans and hopes at all. There is more than a ninety-percent chance that it will not completely be a washout from their point of view.”

That disturbed him a bit. “How long would they need for a hundred-percent success rate? In other words, how much time are we talking about?”

“To do things right—decades. A century, perhaps. I know what you’re thinking. Too long. But the alternative will not be the disaster to my people you counted on, only a major inconvenience.”

He nodded glumly. “And if they are—inconvenienced? What sort of price will they exact on the Confederacy?”

“A terrible one. We had hoped from the beginning to avoid any sort of major bloodshed, although, I admit, the prospect of fouling up the Confederacy has great appeal for us. Foul them up, perhaps try and overthrow them from within, yes—but not all-out war. That prospect appeals not at all to the thinking ones among us, and is exciting only to the naive and the totally psychotic.” The frown came back a bit. “I wonder, though, just how much of the truth you really do know.”

He sat back in his chair, unable to keep a little bit of smugness from his expression and tone, and told Morah the basics. The Chief of Security was impressed.

“Your theory has some holes,” he told the man on the picket ship, “but I am extremely impressed. You certainly know… enough. More than enough. I’m afraid we all vastly underestimated you. Not merely your agents down here in the Diamond, but their boss as well. Particularly their boss.”

“Then you, too, have some holes in what you know,” he came back. “One particularly major one. But I’ll give you that one as a gift—you’ll find out sooner or later anyway, and it might help you in plotting a course. All of them—all four—are not my agents. All four are quite literally me. The Merton Process, remember.”

It had been a complex and elaborate plot by the Confederacy, to counter, in part, an even more complex and enormous plot by their enemy. The Confederacy had been fat and complacent all those centuries, and then, suddenly, it had been confronted with evidence that an alien power of superior technology had discovered them, had fashioned such perfect robots to replace key personnel that absolutely no known method would detect them, and that the Confederacy was, in fact, under some sort of systemized attack. The focus of the attack was the Warden Diamond, four human-habitable worlds used as prison planets for the most brilliant criminal and perverted political minds. The perfect prison, since all four worlds were contaminated by an organism that fed, somehow, off energy available only within the Warden system. The organism invaded the bodies of all who landed there, mutating them and giving them strange powers; but it also imprisoned them, as the organism could not survive far from the Warden system’s sun—and neither could anyone it inhabited.

But placing the top criminal minds and political deviants together on four worlds in contact with one another had created the most powerful criminal center ever known, one whose tentacles spread far from the Warden system and continued to run the criminal underworld of a thousand planets remotely, and more efficiently, than ever before. But all these masterminds were trapped, and they hated the Confederacy for that trap.

Into that situation had come the aliens. Technologically superior to the Confederacy, they were numerically inferior and so alien that they could neither take on the Confederacy openly and win nor do so secretly. Then they encountered the Warden Diamond and realized what the four worlds held. A deal was struck. The heads of the four worlds—the most powerful and ruthless criminal minds alive—the Four Lords of the Diamond were approached with a proposition. Use their own power and the technology of the aliens, together with their knowledge of mankind and the Confederacy, and subvert it. Cause so much trouble, so much disruption, that the Confederacy would be too concerned with its own problems to even think of the Warden Diamond.

Marek Kreegan, Lord of Lilith, himself a former agent for the Confederacy, came up with a detailed plan for replacing key personnel all over the Confederacy with the impossible robots. Through Wagant Laroo’s operation on Cerberus, the robots themselves were first primed with the minds of the very people they would replace. The Cerberans could swap minds as a byproduct of the Warden organism and also had Dr. Merton, creator of the mechanical-mind-exchange process being used experimentally by the Confederacy, to make it work right. Aeolia Matuze of Charon ran a world where almost anything could be easily hidden, so it served as the meeting place between aliens and agents—and as Morah’s base of operations. Finally, Talant Ypsir, Lord of Medusa, provided the hardware, raw materials, and in-system transportation of alien technology—and, perhaps, even the aliens themselves. Each of the Lords also controlled vast underworld organizations within the Confederacy itself.

Kreegan hoped to avoid a terrible war, but he intended to disrupt and perhaps break up the Confederacy itself, leaving a fragmented bunch of worlds he and his fellow Lords could take over. The aliens had promised that, in return for removing the Confederacy’s threat, they would provide a means to escape from the Warden Diamond and its insidious organism.

But when a robot’s cover had been blown, and it had demonstrated its superior capabilities, the Confederacy quickly caught on to the plot and came up with one of its own. To send an agent down on the Warden worlds was not enough. The Lords controlled their worlds; besides, any agent down there was trapped, too, and soon would figure out which side best represented his future.

But, using the Merton Process, the mind of their top agent was simultaneously placed in the bodies of four convicted criminals with long histories; each was sent to one of the four Warden worlds. Also implanted within each was the means by which whatever they saw and did would be transmitted to their original agent, in orbit on the picket ship. With the aid of a sophisticated analytical computer, it was hoped he would be able to piece together the puzzle of the Warden Diamond. In the meantime, his own personality should add psychological reinforcement to the command given the agents down below—kill the Four Lords, disrupt their timetable,, buy time for the Confederacy.

But as the agent watched, even experienced, each of his counterparts’ lives on Lilith, Cerberus, and Charon, he had also watched as his counterparts—himself—threw aside their basic values, their loyalties, the precepts of the Confederacy which he/they had accepted and to which he/they had devoted a lifetime. Now, convinced he’d figured out the plot and being pressured by his computer and his superiors, he was telling Morah this. It was not self-confidence that made him tell the mysterious, still unseen aliens’ Security Chief the secret; rather, it was to inspire confidence. Morah knew and had close at hand at least one of “him”—Park Lacoch of Charon. Now Morah would know just who be was really dealing with.

The Security Chief was suitably impressed. “All of them you? Fascinating. In a sense, it’s taking Kreegan’s robots one step farther. All right—I agree we could probably strike a deal. But I suspect if you’ve lived those lives along with them, you’re not quite the man they sent any more—and they know it. I know the first for a fact, for we are having this conversation. I infer the second from your own statements. You do not expect to survive the next encounter in your lab. So that leaves me nowhere, you see. Any deal we might strike is certain to have no validity to your bosses. Still, I am touched by your attempt—and by your devotion. You do not have to go back into that lab, you know.”

The agent looked squarely at the screen, into those weird eyes that none could look into in person. “If you know me at all, you know that I do. My title is Assassin, but I am no hired killer. I have a job to do—if I can.”

“Just hypothetically—if you can survive this last entry and the report, what would you do? Where would you go? Not back to the Confederacy, surely.”

He grinned. “Are you making a hypothetical job offer?”

“Perhaps. I hope you do survive. It would be most interesting to talk to you at length.”

He laughed. “You have only to talk to Park. Or Cal Tremon. Or Qwin Zhang. Or—hmm … I’ll be damned. I don’t know what name I’ve got on Medusa, I haven’t gotten to that one yet.”

Morah was impressed. “You figured out all you have without Medusa? You have an amazing mind.”

“I was bred for it.” He “sighed. “If I survive, we will meet, and soon. If I do not, then the others, different as they now are, will carry on.”

“It would be fascinating to have the five of you together. That is something to think about.”

“Fascinating, yes,” he admitted, “but I’m not sure I’d be the one in the group who’d be the most popular.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps. I suspect we would have four equally clever, equally ambitious, but different individuals. Still, I thank you for your warning and your offer. I will convey the details to the proper authorities. I, too, hope that massive war can be avoided—but wiser heads than mine will be needed.” He paused. “Good luck, my enemy,” he added sincerely, then broke the connection.

He sat there, just staring at the blank console, for several minutes. You have not considered all the implications…

He was missing something. Morah had been too casual, too sure of himself. One piece, one vital piece, remained. Perhaps it would be found on Medusa. It had to be.

Mirror, mirror…

He didn’t want to go back into that room. Death waited there, death not only for himself but for millions more at the least.

I’m of two minds about this …

Morah’s attitude, now—was it bluff and bravado? Would he pull something? Or was he serious in his hard confidence?

Would 1 He to you?

Sighing, he rose from his chair and walked back to the lab cubicle attached to the rear of the picket ship.

The door to the cubicle he generally called his lab opened for him and then hissed closed with a strange finality. The entire module was attached to the picket ship, but was internally controlled by its own computer. Everything was independent of the ship if need be—power, air, and air-filtration systems, it even had its own food synthesizer. The door was, of necessity, also an airlock; the place was essentially a container with a universal interlock, carried in a space freighter and then eased into its niche in the picket ship by a small tug. Since the module did not have its own propulsion system, it was definitely stuck there until its securing seals were released and it could be backed out by a tug.

The controlling computer recognized only him, and would be resistant to any entry attempt by another—and lethal should the intruder succeed. The trouble was, he knew, the computer had been specially programmed for this mission by the Security Police, and not all that programming was directed toward his safety, survival, and comfort.

“You were not gone very long this time,” the computer remarked through speakers in the wall. It sounded surprised.

“There wasn’t much to do,” he told it, sounding tired. “And even less I could do.”

“You made a call to one of the space stations in the Warden Diamond,” it noted, “on a scrambler circuit. Why? And who did you call?”

“I’m not answerable to you—you’re a machine!” he snapped, then got hold of himself a bit. “That is why the two of us, and not you alone, are on this mission.”

“Why didn’t you use me for the call? It would have been simple.”

“And on the record,” he noted. “Let us face it, my cold companion, you do not work for me but for Security.”

“But so do you,” the computer noted. “We both have the same job to do.”

He nodded absently. “I agree. And you probably have never comprehended why I’m needed at all. But I’ll tell you why, my synthetic friend. They don’t trust you any more than they trust me, for one thing. They fear thinking machines, which is why we never developed the type of organic robot the aliens use. Or, rather, we did once—and lived to regret it.”

“They would be superior,” the computer responded thoughtfully. “But be that as it may, as long as they control my programming and restrict my self-programming, I’m not a threat to them.”

“No, but that’s not really why I’m here. Left to your own devices—pardon the pun—you would simply carry out the mission literally, with no regard for consequences or politics or psychology. You would deliver information even if doing so meant the loss of billions of lives. I, on the other hand, can subjectively filter those findings and weigh more factors than the bare mission outline. And that’s why they trust me more than you—even though they hardly trust me, which is why you are here. We guard and check one another. We’re not partners, you know—we are actually antagonists.”

“Not so,” the computer responded. “You and I both have the same mission from the same source. It is not our job to evaluate the information subjectively, only to report the truth. The evaluation will be made by others—many others, better equipped to do so. You are assuming a godlike egocentric personality that is neither warranted nor justified. Now—who did you call?”

“Yatek Morah,” he responded.

“Why?”

“I wanted him to know that I knew. I wanted his masters to know that as well. I find war inevitable. However, I also find that his side loses everything, while we lose a great deal but hardly all. It was my decision to face him with that fact and to give the ball to him, as it were. Either he and his masters come up with a solution, or war is inevitable.”

“This is a questionable tactic, but it is done. How did he take it?”

“That’s just the trouble. He took it. It didn’t seem to worry him or bother him. That’s what I had to know. He is, I believe, sincerely interested in avoiding war for his own purposes, but he is not worried about it from the viewpoint of those who employ him. It was the one thing I could not get from the field reports—a direct sense of how the aliens view the war threat.”

“It was only a viewing scanner on a single individual,” the computer noted. “He could be bluffing. All things considered, how else could he react?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side. “No. Call it gut instinct, call it hunch or intuition, or whatever you wish—but also call it, too, experience. Reading the length of pauses, the slight tone of Voice, the subtle shifts in the body to bad news and flawless reasoning. There is still something missing in our information. He as much as said it himself.”

“That is interesting, however. He confirmed the basics?”

He nodded. “We’re right—dead on. That was the other reason for the call. Still, I feel no joy in it—for if we’re completely right, then what factor has been overlooked? To have all one’s deductions and inferences confirmed is gratifying. But to discover that, being right on the wildest stretches of logic, you have missed a factor that they consider decisive—that is frustrating.”

“I believe I understand. This is what made you return, was it not? You fear the Confederacy and me as much as the aliens—perhaps more. Yet you came back. Such conviction, when faced with your brilliant deductions, carries weight. All right. We are missing a factor. What is it?”

“There’s no way to know. Morah came out and told me that I’d not carried my deductions to their logical conclusions.” He sighed and drummed his fingers against a desk top. “It must have to do with the nature of the aliens. He called them incomprehensible, basically, yet he said he understood what they were doing. That means it is a question not of deed but motivation.” The fist slammed down hard on the desk. “But we know their motivation, dammit! It has to be!” Again he struggled to get hold of himself.

“We are still handicapped in one way,” the computer noted. “We have not yet met the aliens, not yet seen them. We still know nothing about them other than the inference that they breathe an atmosphere similar to human norm, and are comfortable within normal temperature ranges.”

He nodded. “That’s the problem. And that I’m not likely to get from Medusa, either, unless there’s some miracle. A psychotic killer who sees them thinks of them as evil. A psychotic Lord thinks of them as funny-looking but hardly evil, just self-interested. And intellects like Kreegan and Morah see them as a positive force. And that’s all we really know, isn’t it? After all this …”

“No race lasts long enough to reach the stars and do all that this one has done unless it first acts in its own self-interest,” the computer noted. “We can probably dismiss the evil concept of the criminal on one of dozens of bases, the most probable being that these aliens are subjectively terrifying to look at, or smell putrid, or something of that sort. It is hardly likely that their evolution, even given some of the same basics as humankind, is anything like that of humans.”

He nodded. “I keep thinking of Morah’s inhuman eyes. He claims he is not a robot and that he is the same Yatek Morah sentenced to the Diamond more than forty years ago. We need not believe him, and should not, but let’s for a moment take his statements at face value. If he is who and what he claims to be—then why those eyes?”

“A Warden modification, possibly self-induced for effect. He could do it easily on Charon.”

“Perhaps. But, perhaps, too, those eyes mean something more. What does he see with them? And how? A broader spectrum, perhaps? I don’t think they are totally for effect. For protection, maybe? I wonder …”

“Still, the bottom line remains your report,” the computer noted. “I will admit that I, too, am somewhat curious, even though I have the basics.”

“Medusa first. Let’s complete the set. Maybe my missing piece will be found there. Or, maybe, what I experience will jog my mind to see those missing implications. It can’t hurt.”

“But Talant Ypsir lives. The mission is incomplete there.”

“We are beyond caring about the Lords of the Diamond now, I think, except, perhaps, in some sort of solution if one is possible. I need information. Medusa will have the most direct contacts with the aliens. Let me get the information I need.”

“But whether or not it is there, you will still make your report after that?”

He nodded. “I’ll make my report.” He got up and walked forward to the central console, then sat down in the large padded chair and adjusted it for maximum comfort. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.” The computer lowered the probes, which the agent carefully attached to his forehead. Now he simply lay back and relaxed, hardly feeling the computer-induced injection that cleared his mind and established the proper state for receipt and filtration of this kind of information.

Thanks to an organic module inside the brain of his other self down there on Medusa, every single thing that had happened to that other self was transmitted to the computer as raw data. Now it would be fed into the mind of the original in the chair, filtered—the basics and unimportant matter discarded by his own mind—and that other self would give a basic report both to the agent in the chair and to the computer as if the man were there in that room—which, in a very broad and very odd sense, he was.

The drugs and small neural probes did their job. His own mind and personality receded, replaced by a similar, yet oddly different pattern.

“The agent is commanded to report,” the computer ordered, sending the command deep into the agent’s mind, a mind no longer quite his own.

Recorders clicked on.

Slowly, the man in the chair cleared his throat. He mumbled, groaned, and made odd, disjointed words and sounds, as his mind received, coded, and classified the incoming data, adjusted it all, and sorted it out.

Finally, the man began to speak.