Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

CHAPTER ONE Rebirth

After Krega’s talk and a little preparation to put my own affairs in order—this would be a long one—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—and much of it was simply too hot to ever be known. To avoid such risks, all agents, of course, had their own experience of sensitive missions wiped from their minds when they were over.

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 these 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. I bummed around, swam, gambled, ate in the best restaurants, played a little semi-pro ball or cube—I’m pretty good, and the exercise keeps me in shape. I enjoyed every minute of it, and except for my regular requalification training sessions—four-to-six-week stints that resemble military basic training only nastier and more sadistic—I felt no guilt over my playboy life. The training sessions, of course, make sure that your body and mind don’t stagnate from all that good living.

They implant sensors in you that they constantly monitor and decide when you need a good refresher.

I often wondered just how sophisticated those sensors were. Having a whole security staff witness all my debauchery and indiscretions once worried me, but after a while I learned to ignore it.

The life offered in trade is just too nice. Besides, what could I do about it? People on most of the civilized worlds these days had such sensors, although hardly to the degree and sophistication of mine. How else could a population so vast and so spread out possibly be kept orderly, progressive, and peaceful?

But, of course, when a mission came up you couldn’t afford to forego all that 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 bis mistakes. In the Security Clinic they had everything you ever experienced, and the first thing you did was go and get the rest of you put back so you would be whole for whatever mission they’d dreamed up this time.

I was always amazed when I got up from that chair with my past fully restored. Clear as my memory was once again, it was hard to believe that 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 offenders on the Warden Diamond 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 among the traders and miners and free-boosters who operated there, and who were, of course, necessary in an expanding culture since a high degree of individuality, self-reliance, originality, and creativity was required in the dangerous environment in which they lived. A stupid government would have eliminated all such, but a stupid government degenerates into stagnancy or loses its vitality and growth potential by standardization. Utopia was for the masses, of course, but not for everyone or it wouldn’t be Utopia very long.

That, of course, was the original reason for the Warden Diamond Reserve. Some of these hardy frontier people are so individualistic that they become a threat to the stability of the civilized worlds. The trouble is, anybody able to crack the fabric that holds our society together has, most likely, the smartest, nastiest, most original sort of mind humanity can produce—and, therefore, he is not somebody who should be idly wiped clean. The Diamond, it was felt, would effectively trap those individuals forever, yet allow them continued creative opportunities. Properly monitored, they might still produce something of value for the Confederacy—if only an idea, a thought, a way of looking at something that nobody else could evolve.

Of course, these felons were anxious to please, since the alternative was death. Eventually such creative minds made themselves indispensable to the Confederacy and insured their continued survival. The possibility had been foreseen—but it wasn’t altogether unwelcome, either. Like all criminal organizations in the past, this one provided services that people were convinced should be illegal or were immoral or somesuch, but which masses of people wanted anyway.

The damned probe hurt like hell. Usually there was just some tingling, then a sensation much like sleep. You woke up a few minutes later in the chair, once again yourself. 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 huge, 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, and again I was amazed at many of my past exploits. Considering my surrogate selves couldn’t be wiped after this mission as could I, I made a mental note that those surrogates would almost certainly have to be killed if they did have 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 Td 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, next to which was a standard food port, and, in the wall, a pulldown toilet. That was it. Nothing else—or was there?

I looked around and easily spotted the obvious. 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 where I was.

I was in 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 examined my body. It was smaller, lighter, thinner than I was used to, but it was clearly the body of a male of the civilized worlds. What made it different, or unusual compared to my own, didn’t hit me right away, but I finally put my finger on it. It was its unspoiled, unmarked newness, a body not yet in full development—not even much pubic hair. It was the body of someone extremely young. It wasn’t my body, and I could only stand there, stunned, for I don’t know how long.

I’m not me! my mind screamed at me. Tm one of them—one of the surrogates! 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 after a while to anger—anger and frustration. I was a copy,, an imitation of somebody else entirely, somebody still alive and kicking and perhaps monitoring my every move, my every thought. I hated that other then, hated him with a pathological force that was beyond reason. He would sit there comfortable and safe, watching me work, watching me do it all—and, when it 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 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 anyway at the completion of it, for insurance sake.

My training came into automatic play at that point, overriding the shock and anger. I regained control and considered all that I knew.

Monitor? Sure—more than ever. I recalled Krega saying that there was some sort of organic linkup. Are you enjoying this, you son of a bitch? Are you getting pleasure from vicariously experiencing my reaction?

My training clicked in again, dampening me down. It didn’t matter, I told myself. First of all, I knew what he must be thinking—and that was an advantage. He, of all people, would know that I would be a damned tough son of a bitch to kill.

It was a shock to’discover that you were not who you thought you were but some artificial creation. It was a shock, too, to realize that the old life, the life you remembered even if you, personally, didn’t experience it, was gone forever. No more civilized worlds, no more casinos and beautiful women and all the money you could spend. And yet—and yet, as I sat there, I adjusted. That was what they picked men like me for from the start—our ability to adjust and adapt to almost anything.

It was not my body, but I was still me. Memory and thought and personality were an individual, not his body. This was no different from a biological disguise, I told myself, of a particularly sophisticated sort. As to who 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 in 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 me, the created me, I thought. He, that nonentity playboy that presently did not exist, was the artificial personality. Me—the real me—was bottled up and stored in their psychosurgical computers and only allowed to come out when they needed it—and for good reason. Unlocked, I was as much a danger to the power structure as to whomever 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 and I wouldn’t be killed if I could help it. That other me, sitting there in the console—somehow I no longer hated him Very much, no longer felt anything at all for him. When this was all over he’d be wiped once more—perhaps even killed himself if my brother agents and I on the Diamond found out too much. At best he’d return to being that stagnant milquetoast.

Me, on the other hand… Me. I would still be here, still live on, the real me. I would become 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, from robot satellite, and without a qualm. I would. But my vulnerability would last only until I mastered my new situation and my new and permanent home. I felt that with a deep sense of certainty—for I knew their methods and how they thought. I’d have to do their dirty work for them, and they knew it—but only until I could get around it. They could be beaten, even on their own turf. That was why they had people like me in the first place—to uncover those who expertly covered over their whole lives and activities, who managed to totally vanish from their best monitors. To uncover them and get them. But there’d be no new expert agent sent to get me if I beat them. They’d just be putting somebody else in the same position.

I realized then, as they had undoubtedly figured, that I had no choice but to carry out the mission. As long as I was doing what they wanted I would be safe from them while still in that vulnerable stage. 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 if you felt nothing about the cause—then it was 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 either way—I was trapped on a Warden world from now on anyway. If the aliens won the coming confrontation, the Wardens would survive as allies. If they lost—well, it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference, only continue the current situation. Thus, the alien problem was purely an intellectual challenge and that made it perfect.

The other problem created a similar situation. Seek out the Lord of the particular Diamond world and kill him if I could. In a sense doing so would be more difficult, for I’d be operating on totally unfamiliar ground and would, therefore, require time and, perhaps, allies. Another challenge. And, if I got him, it could only increase my own power and position in the long run. If he got me instead, of course, that would solve everybody’s problem—but the thought of losing is abhorrent to me. That set the contest in the best terms, from my point of view. Trackdown assassination was the ultimate game, since you won or you died and did not have to live with the thought that you lost.

It suddenly occurred to me that the only real difference that probably existed between me and a 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 that.’ Fine. Dead heat on moral grounds.

The only thing wrong at this point, I reflected, was that they were starting me at a tremendous disadvantage and I disliked having more than necessary. The normal procedure was to program all pertinent information into my brain before they sent me off on a mission—but they hadn’t done it this time. Probably, I thought, because they had me on the table once for four separate missions—and the transfer process, to a new body, was hard enough without trying to add anything afterward. Still, knowing this put me in a deep pit. I thought sourly that somebody should have thought of that.

Somebody did, but it was a while before I discovered how. About an hour after I had awakened a little bell clanged near the food port and I walked over to it. Almost instantly a hot tray appeared, along with a thin plastic fork and knife that I recognized as the dissolving type. They’d melt into a sticky puddle in an hour or less, then dry up and become a dry powder shortly after that. Standard for prisoners.

The food was lousy but I hadn’t expected better. The vitamin-enriched fruit drink with it, though, was pretty good, and I made the most of it. I kept the thin, clear container, which was not the dissolving type, in case I wanted water later. The rest I put back in the port, and it vaporized neatly. All nice and sealed. You couldn’t even draw more than a thimble full of water at a time from the tap.

About the only thing they couldn’t control was my bodily functions, and a half-hour or so after eating my first meal as what you might call a new man, I just had to go. I tugged on the toilet pull ring on the far wall, the unit came down—and damned if there wasn’t a small, paper-thin probe in the recess behind it. And so, I sat down on the John, leaned back against the panel, and got a brief and relief at the same time.

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 programming, but it allowed them to talk to me, even send me pictures that only I could see and hear.

“By now I hope you’re over the shock of discovering who and what you are,” Krega’s voice came to me, seemingly forming in my brain. It was a shock to realize that not even my jailers could hear or see a thing.

“We have to brief you this way simply because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Oh, don’t worry about it—it’s permanent. But we prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock and we haven’t the time to allow you to ‘set in’ completely, as it were. This method will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel that you have a difficult enough assignment as is, perhaps impossible.”

I felt the excitement rising within me. The challenge, the challenge …

“Your objective world is’Medusa, farthest out from the sun of the Diamond colonies,” the Commander’s voice continued. “If there is a single place in the universe where man can live but wouldn’t want to, it’s Medusa. Old Warden, who discovered the system, said he named the place after the mythological creature that turned men to stone because anybody who’d want to live there had to have rocks in his head. That’s pretty close to the truth.

“The imprint ability of this device is limited,” he continued, “but we can send you one basic thing that may—or may not—be of use to you on Medusa. It is a physical-political map of the entire planet as complete and up-to-date as we could make it.”

That puzzled me. Why would such a map not be of use? Before I could consider the matter further, and curse my inability to ask Krega questions, I felt a sharp back pain, then a short wave of dizziness and nausea. When the haze cleared, I found that I had the complete map clearly and indelibly etched in my mind.

There followed a stream of facts about the place. The planet was roughly 46,000 kilometers both around the equator—and in polar circumference, allowing for topographic differences. Like all four Diamond worlds, it was basically a ball—highly unusual as planets go, even though everybody, including me, thinks of all major planets as spherical…

The gravity was roughly 1.2 norm, so I would have to adjust to being a bit slower and heavier than usual. That would take a slight adjustment in timing, and I made a note to work on that first thing. Its atmosphere was within a few hundredths of a percentage point of human standard—far too little difference to be noticeable, since nobody I know ever actually experienced that human standard in real life.

Medusa’s axial tilt of roughly 22° gave the world strong seasonal changes under normal circumstances, but at over three hundred million kilometers from its F-type sun it was, at best, a tad chilly. In point of fact, something like seventy percent of Medusa was so glaciated that it consisted of just two large polar caps with a sandwich of real planet in between on both sides of the equator. Its day was a bit long, but not more than an hour off the standard and hardly a matter of concern. What was a concern was that those wonderful tropic temperatures were something around 10° C at the equator or at midsummer, and that could drop to-20 at the tropic extremes in midwinter. But the life zone did extend for some distance beyond that—up and down to a jagged glacial line at roughly 35° latitude, give or take a few degrees, and in that subtropical zone at midwinter a brisk -80° C. Some climate 11 sincerely hoped that they provided free insulated gear from the moment of arrival, particularly since that map in my head said that a’ number of cities were located in the coldest areas.

Continents were pretty much irrelevant, since the seas were frozen down to the habitable zones all the time and down to almost the tropic lines half the year. There were three distinct habitable land masses that I could see from the map, though, so you might as well say three very wide and very thin continents. Throughout the habitable latitudes there was a lot of mountain that didn’t help the climate much, and a huge amount of forest, all of which seemed to be various evergreen types. Nothing familiar, of course, but familiar types in any cold climate.

A rocky, terribly cold, hostile world. Calling it human-habitable was stretching things a bit, no matter the air you breathed. About the only thing of interest was that Medusa, of all places, showed the only evidence of vulcanism on any of the Warden worlds. No volcanoes—but that would be too much, anyway, for any person to stand. But there were large thermal pools, hot springs, and even geysers in the midst of the barren wastes, some in the coldest regions. Obviously there was something hot beneath many parts of the surface.

There was animal life, though—mostly mammals, it seemed, of a great many varieties. That figured, really—only mammals could survive that kind of climate. Some were nasty, some harmless, some a little of both, but nothing alive could be taken for granted on such a fierce, harsh place where just staying alive took tremendous effort.

Well, I’d better start loving it, I told myself. Short of suicide, there was no way to avoid calling it home. At least it was a supposedly modern and industrialized world, so there would be creature comforts.

“Medusa is ruled with an iron hand by Talant Ypsir, a former member of the Confederacy Council. Ypsir attempted to engineer a coup of sorts more than thirty-five years ago. It was hushed up, and he dropped from sight and disappeared from the news, but the object of his coup was to make fundamental changes in the way the civilized worlds, and even the frontier, were organized and administered. His system was so brutal and so naked a grab for absolute personal power that he eventually shocked even his most ardent adherent’s who betrayed him. Unlike Charon’s Aeolia Matuze, also once a Council member, Ypsir was never popular or trusted, but he had an absolute genius for bureaucratic organization and was at one time head of the civil service. Be warned that he and his minions run Medusa with the same brutal, methodical system he once hoped to impose on all mankind, and that the cities are models of efficiency, as is the economy, but in every way absolutely under his control. His government controls only the organized settlements, however—although that is the bulk of the more than twelve million people estimated to be Medusa’s current population. As his industries are fueled from the mines on the moons of Momrath, the gas giant that is the next planet out from Medusa, and there is little in that wilderness except water and wood, he makes no effort to extend his authority to that wild area.”

I remembered Matuze well, but I had to admit I’d never heard of this Ypsir. Well, it was long ago and the Council was pretty large. Besides, who the hell ever knows the head of the civil service anyway?

As to who I was, I got my first mental picture of myself from the briefing, and it was a bit of a shock. I’d had a sense of being younger, true—but the body I now wore was little more than fourteen, barely into puberty. It was, however, a civilized-world-norm body, and that was good enough, although it was from Halstansir, a world I didn’t know. I could infer a lot, though, simply from the skin, basic build, and facial features. I was now relatively tall and thin, with a burnt-orange complexion, and the boyish face had jet-black hair but no trace of sideburns or beard, almond-shaped black eyes, and fairly thick, flat nose over broad lips. It was a strong, handsome face and body—but very, very young-looking.

So what was a fourteen-year-old boy doing on his way to the Diamond? Well, Tarin Bul of Halstansir was a rather exceptional young lad. The son of a local administrator, he’d been raised in pampered splendor. But Hal-stansir’s Council member, a man named Daca Kra, had apparently used the boy’s father as a scapegoat in a minor scandal, exposing him to ridicule and personal ruin. The older Bul just couldn’t stand it, and, refusing psych treatment, killed himself instead. Such things happened occasionally, particularly on the upper political levels. What didn’t happen, even occasionally, was what the boy, who just about worshiped his father, had done then. Taking advantage of the natural sympathy of the first families of Halstansir, Tarin Bul had plotted, planned, and trained to get to a reception for Daca Kra—where he’d assassinated the Councillor, in mid-handshake, by the rather quaint and ugly method of disembowling the man with a sword used in physical training. The boy was a prepubescent twelve at the time, which caused more problems than the nearly unprecedented assassination.

Of course we picked him up and got him off-planet, where we had him evaluated by psychs, but he’d withdrawn from the world into a better one of his own imagination after carrying out the kill. The psychs could hardly reach him at all, though they spent a lot of time trying. Normally they would have simply done a complete wipe of his mind and built a new personality, but Kra’s family used some influence of its own. So now Tarin Bul was out of his shell and on his way to Medusa—but “not really. Bul had died as soon as my mind displaced his. 7 was now Tarin Bul, and I wondered how an ex-Councillor would take to a boy who’d killed one of his colleagues.

Still, that would be a ways off as yet. I could see certain real advantages in the body—not the least of which was the fact that I had an extra thirty years or so on my life—but there would also be disadvantages as well. There would be the tendency to treat me as a child—and, because it was my cover, I had to go along to a certain extent. But though children get a bit more license than adults in simple behavioral areas, they are also subject to more rigid social controls. That realization led me onto the path of determining my best and most effective persona. The fact that Bul was a male of the civilized worlds bora to a political family meant his IQ and general formative education would be expected to be well above average. The fact that he’d engineered a successful assassination and survived, even being sent to the Warden Diamond, was another plus. I would have no trouble convincing anyone that I was quite a bit. older than my years, which eased the problem quite a bit. Being a tough, smart kid would be an easy and useful role to play.

I lay back down on the cot and put myself in a light trance, going over all the briefing information, filing, sorting, thinking everything out. Particularly important were the details, large and small, of Bul’s short life and family, since it was in that area I’d be most vulnerable to a trip-up. I also studied his mannerisms, nervous habits, and the like, and tried to get myself into the mind-set of a small but deadly assassin.

By the time I reached Medusa I knew I’d better be perfect for my own sake. I had another assassination to add to Tarin Bul’s total still to come, and though I hoped they would underestimate me, I did not for one moment underestimate Talant Ypsir.