Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

CHAPTER SIX A Disloyal Opposition

Ching was, as promised, no different on my return than when I’d left her and, also as advertised, she told me that she’d been waiting in the room for me worriedly for the previous few hours. If I hadn’t been told differently, I would have sworn she was narrating the correct version of events, rather than just what she was told to remember.

Two days later we were both summoned to the Guild Hall for an audience with a top-grade supervisor. I played the surprised worker that Ching genuinely was. There we were informed that we had shown ourselves more than capable of higher positions. Effective immediately, we were being promoted to In-Service Passenger Attendants, Grade 6, and would shortly be assigned for a week of training and evaluation. Since we’d been Grade 3s (I never did learn what Is and 2s were—I could hardly imagine anything lower than bus cleaners) this was a substantial jump, although it was, of course, contingent on our successful training and initial job performance evaluations. The job actually only warranted a Grade 5, but the extra bump was given because we would now have two homes many kilometers apart, and would have double toiletries and the like. At our previous level you owned virtually nothing at all—you couldn’t afford it—but, while we wouldn’t be very well off compared to many others, we⁷ would now have a bit left over from basic expenses for luxuries.

We presented our cards, which were run through a computer and popped back to us apparently unchanged, but we knew that the information now reflected increased grade and status. We also had two days until our new shift, an afternoon one, would properly cycle so we could join our crew. We actually had some time to kill and made the most of it. Ching was particularly excited and pleased by the turn of events, and I tried as hard as I could to share in her joy and excitement. Doing so was tough when you knew what was really going on.

Two days later we went down to the main passenger terminal and found Shift Supervisor Morphy, a distinguished-looking woman in early middle age who looked a little like civilized worlders. A native most definitely, I decided, but a child or grandchild of a civilized worlder and a frontier type. These were very common on Medusa.

The job wasn’t very glamorous or exciting, despite the fancy titles. Basically we patrolled the cars, wiping passenger’s noses, answering then: stupid questions, explaining how to get food or drink or how to operate the seat terminals as well as making sure that all the amenities were working properly. In some ways this was worse than cleaning buses. In that job, I mostly stood around and goofed off while seeing that the cleaning machines did their jobs properly, while here I was constantly exposed to the public and observed by shift supervisors as I walked from one end of the train to the other and back. And I had to be very neat, and very clean, and always smile, smile. …

In one way the job was similar to tracking down and confronting criminals. Both were filled with repetition and long, boring stretches, yet both were at the same time interesting and disgusting.

Our train usually had two or three passenger cars and the rest freight. The freight level remained constant but the passenger car number increased or decreased according to demand. In the first week we had one six-car passenger train and another that had only one, but never did we have a run with none.

The training period was really grating at tunes, with every little thing criticized. I almost belted Morphy more than once. The week seemed to last forever. Finally, though, we were on our own and less closely supervised, and things eased up a bit.

Train crews had distinctive uniforms, nicely tailored and with overly large insignia on them. Since a lot of our own Guild’s members used the trains to get to and from where they were needed, there had to be some way to tell the specific train’s crew from others in transportation. We looked, in fact, pretty elegant by Medusan standards, but that was par for the course. I remember a fancy resort once, long ago, that used a lot of human attendants just to give the place a more elegant and personal feel, and the best-dressed people in the joint were the doorman and the waiters.

Our new room in Rochande was virtually identical to the one back in Gray Basin, the only difference being that it was on the third, not the fourth, floor and the beds were against the left rather than the right wall. A mirror image, basically, to remind us where we were.

Rochande, however, was quite different from Gray Basin if only because of its geography. It was a food-distribution center for the region, and, therefore, a space-freight port. It was also pretty far south, comparatively speaking, and while the winter still hit it was neither long nor hard, and the city was on the surface rather than dug in and roofed over. There were also huge forests around, and quite a number of exotic plants, which gave the place a whole different feel, even if the city’s pie-shaped design and dull, blocky architecture was depressingly familiar.

The trip south, once through the electronic barricades of Gray Basin, was interesting, too. You could see the climate gradually change as you moved south, with occasional breaks in the thinning snow patches, showing hardy grasses at first, then some bushes, and eventually increasingly larger trees. Finally we were more or less out of the hard winter and into a more temperate zone. The world was not nearly as bad as Gray Basin made it seem, though there was not a sign of cultivation or even roads in sight for the entire distance. More than the climate and vegetation changes, that was the true contrast on Medusa, one brought home with every trip. In the cities and towns, and on the sleek, smooth, modern trains, you were in a highly technological, modern society though a regimented one. Outside the cities was a primitive world.

It was a world that was said to have genuine threats although I’d been able to learn very little about it. Basically, the people were very secure in their modern pockets on this wilderness world and most of them had never been beyond their society’s protection. What exactly was out there, other than wild and vicious animals, some of whom could change their shape, was really unknown. I found the stories about shape-changing most interesting and made it a point to research those animals as much as I could with the library access on the terminal. Apparently the Medusans didn’t even like to study these creatures, at least not publicly. If, in fact, some of those creatures could shape-change—something not even alluded to in the descriptions—I could see why Medusan authorities wouldn’t want the opportunity to plant ideas like mine into crooked heads.

The dominant life forms were mammals, however, something I found interesting but logical—reptiles couldn’t really have much of a future on a world as cold as this, and insects would have too short a developmental season each year to do more than fill an ecological niche. Even the ocean creatures, as far as was known, were air-breathing mammals, since, apparently, the algae and plankton that would support a real fishy evolution was low, and the seas were relatively shallow.

The familiar pattern of animal development was here, though, with one vegetarian species called vettas eating mostly grasses and another called tubros eating mostly leaves and other parts of trees, apparently instinctively trimming but not killing. The big, nasty brutes were the harrar, who mostly ate vettas and tubros. There were several hundred subspecies of the two vegetarian types, and several varieties of harrar. The rest of the animal kingdom was varied, vast, and mostly invisible, but fitted into the normal balance of nature in totally expected ways. I concentrated on the dominant life forms, except for the smaller creatures that were poisonous or nasty, because I hoped to find some clues in the big ones to what I was looking for.

As for looks, the vettas had large, flat, toothy bills, big, round eyes, short necks, and legs that were very wide, clawed, and padded, and yet they could move when they had to, at speeds up to forty kilometers per hour for short distances. The tubros had long, thin snouts, necks that bent in all directions and were longer than their bodies, and enormous, clawed limbs that were almost handlike. Their tails somewhat resembled their necks, and they occasionally used these tails as decoys when checking to see if the coast was clear. Apparently the tails came out if bitten. Tubros weren’t very fast, but they could climb trees in a flash and could sleep either right side up or upside down, clinging to strong branches or trunks. Vettas had no real defense except their speed; tubros, however, could be nasty when cornered, and could use that tail of theirs like a whip.

The harrar was the hardest to phi down. Mostly it looked like a huge, undulating mass of fur, skin, and taloned feet that were almost birdlike. It generally walked, looking ridiculous, on those legs; but when it caught prey, two small, nasty hands in that fur were strong enough to tear heads off. Somewhere in that lump, was the biggest mouth relative to body size that I’d ever seen, with row upon row of teeth. The harrar interested me the most, since it was, according to the legends, a shape-changer. This critter would need to eat a lot to feed that big body, and it could hardly climb trees or outrun anything going forty kilometers per hour.

The sea creatures seemed to mirror those on land, except that there were more levels with far greater interdependence, starting with the little slugs that ate bacterialike organisms near the surface and also scavenged the bottom, up to water-born counterparts of the vettas and tubros. Despite smooth sides and flippers and fins, these looked very much like their land counterparts—but were omnivores, eating smaller animals as well as surface and bottom water plants. There was also an amphibious version of the harrar, which appeared to be a one-ton or more lump of gray or black with dorsal and tail fins, little beady eyes, a big, big mouth—and little else. This sea carnivore, called makhara, seemed totally unable to cope with swift prey—yet it had to do pretty well to keep that mass of fat happy. How did it do it? How, in fact, could it even grab its prey? These questions, too, were not only unanswered in the texts, they were unasked.

There were no tubros north of the twenty-eighth parallel, where the trees became too small or intermittent to support such life. But there were snow vettas able to burrow under meters of snow and ice to get at whatever was down there, and harrar to hunt them. That, too, was interesting. Lots of stuff on the unique life cycle of the snow vetta, nothing but a mention that the harrar were there. That implied that there were no snow harrar, and again brought up an interesting question: how did the dark, bulky, ungainly harrar ever catch its quota of snow vetta, many of whom spent most of their time burrowing deep beneath the snows?

Ching, to my surprise, became interested in some of my studies. It was amazing to me that someone born and raised on Medusa knew so little about the bulk of the planet. But she was aware of her ignorance—after first confessing that, until I looked into these things, she’d never even thought about them—and eager to fill the gap.

One thing was for sure—they were really scared of those harrar, even ia the highest councils of Medusa. You had only to think of the double energy guard around Gray Basin’s entrances, and even Rochande had a double perimeter fence of the same lethal energy barrier around it. Of course, such a system, for the protection of the public—sold and accepted as such—also kept the people tightly inside their monitored cities and protected trains. Even those trains were sealed compartments, totally insulated from the outside world, almost as if they were spacecraft sealing off their occupants from some lethal, alien environment.

Man had always triumphed over the most vicious and lethal carnivores on world after world. Yet here it seemed almost as if the legendary harrar were allowed to breed and roam and multiply; and they probably were, not so much from technological as from political motives. Raised in insulated cradle-to-grave technological pockets, most Medusans probably couldn’t survive a day without those conveniences they took for granted. This suited the Medusan authorities very well indeed.

Whether the doing of Ypsir or of his predecessor, this was a unique society and something of a work of genius, based on the fact that Lilith and Charon supplied so much food there was no necessity to raise any on Medusa, and technology had maintained the closed culture of Medusa and fed it.

We worked some six weeks with nothing happening, and I was beginning to grow bored and worried and fidgety once more. Neither TMS nor this mysterious Opposition I only half believed in had surfaced, and I was beginning to wrack my brain once more for a different opening.

Ching dismissed my irritation as moodiness, something she was used to by now, but I was determined to do something to get me off dead center and beat the system. Of course, just when I’d given up all hope or belief in the Opposition, I heard from them. And heard is the right word, although they took a leaf from Krega’s notebook.

We had a separate crew’s toilet on the train, just forward of the first passenger car, and, as usual, I went there to take a piss. Such occasions were one of the very few times I was separated not only from Ching, who had to keep working while I went and vice versa, but also from the supervisors and general passengers. There was, of course, a monitoring device in. the John.

“Tarin Bul?” I heard the voice, electronically distorted, and looked up and around, puzzzled. I’d been called by vox on the terminal many times, but the voices had never sounded as inhuman as this.

“Yes?”

“We’ve been watching you, Tarin Bul.”

“Aren’t you always?” I cracked, zipping up my pants and going to the washbasin.

“We are not TMS,” the voice told me. “We do not like TMS very much. We suspect that, by now, you don’t like them much, either.”

I shrugged and washed my hands. “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t on that one,” I told the voice sincerely. “If this is a test by TMS and I say I don’t like them, I’ll get picked up and asked why. If, on the other hand, I say I just love TMS, they’ll pick me up for sure and rush me to the nearest psych. So I’ll pass on the answer, and unless there’s something else I’ve got to go back to work.”

“We are not TMS,” the voice told me. “We are in opposition to the TMS and the current government of Medusa. We are powerful enough to feed a false signal, recorded earlier, of you sitting on the toilet to TMS monitors while we use this channel to talk to you.”

“Says you,” I retorted.

“You’re no native, programmed to this life. Why do you not accept what we say?”

“For one thing, if you’re that powerful you don’t need me. And if you do need me, and are that powerful, then you’re either phony or pretty, incompetent rebels.”

“We don’t need you,” the voice responded. “We want you. That is a different thing. The more people in more guilds we have, the stronger we become, the better able to manage this world after it is ours. You in particular have two attributes of value to us. You have mobility due to your job, which is invaluable in our society. And, you are not a native of this world, and sooner or later it will drive you crazy.”

“Maybe it already has,” I said, retaining my skeptical tone. “But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I believe you’re who and what you say. What good does it do me?”

“Listen carefully, for we will say this only once, and time is short. Someone will soon miss you and come in demanding to know why you are not back at work. You have one chance and one chance only to join us. At your next layover at Rochande you have a day off. Go to the matinee show at the Grand Theater that day. Sit in the balcony. Leave to go to the bathroom halfway through the first act. We will contact you.”

“And my pair-mate?”

“Not at the first meeting. Later we will arrange for her as well. This communication is ended. Guard your comments.”

And, with that, things were, allegedly, back to normal. I left quickly and returned to work. Ching noticed that I seemed cheerier than I had for weeks, but couldn’t figure out why.

We always went out for a special meal and a show on our day off and when I suggested the Grand, Ching wasn’t the least surprised. As instructed long ago, I keyed in the code on my terminal that told me how much credit we had for our day on the town—and simultaneously let my TMS contact know that things had, finally, started to roll. I had no intention of double-crossing either side until Td gotten what I wanted from this assignment, and certainly not until I could get away with it.

When you’re sitting in the middle of a dark and crowded theater you-can instantly make yourself a villain in a number of ways, but the worst is to go to the bathroom in the middle of the show. I finally made it to the aisle through the curses and dirty looks—made worse by the sure and certain knowledge that I’d be back—and proceeded to the upper lobby, where the large rest room was located. As I passed the last row of seats—far more sparsely populated since they were so far from the screen you might as well have dialed the show on your terminal—a hand shot out from a darkened seat, grabbed my arm, and pulled me over with such force I almost lost my balance.

All I could really tell about her was that she was tall, lean, and looked to be a pure civilized worlder. “Listen, Bul,” she whispered, “just sit down and make like you’re watching the show. Let me do the talking.”

“Fair enough,” I whispered back, and sat.

“Are you still interested in our organization?”

“I still don’t believe in it,” I told her, “but I’m here, at least out of curiosity.”

“That’s enough—for now. Just two blocks north of this theater is a small café, the Gringol. Go there after the show. Order what you like from the menu. Wait for us. We will take care of things from that point on, both with you and with TMS. If you are not there, you will never hear from us again. Now get up and go to the toilet.”

I started to open my mouth and respond, then thought better of it, and did as instructed.

Ching and I watched the rest of the show, then wandered outside, where it was still light but would not be for much longer. I suggested a walk to get the kinks out of my leg. In the middle of the second block north of the theater, I spotted the small sign for the Gringol and turned to Ching. “I’m getting hungry. Want to get something?”

“Sure. Why not? Got anyplace in mind? How flush are we?”

“Not very,” I told her, and that was the truth, despite the extra cash. “Let’s see what this café has.” The maneuver was nice and smooth and natural, and she didn’t suspect a thing.

The place was small and dimly lit, although, of course, that would not matter to TMS and its ever-present monitors. Still, in a world with cafeteria sameness, the occasional trip to a restaurant or café, with an actual menu from which to select meals, was a real treat. Sometimes, the food in small places like this was even prepared by humans with their own special recipes, mostly Warden exiles or those with recipes passed down from exiles and pioneers.

“Looks expensive,” Ching said dubiously. “Are you sure we can afford this?”

“Probably not, but what the hell,” I responded, picking a small two-person table in the back and sitting down. The place was almost empty, although a few more people drifted in as we sat A human waitress arrived from the back and handed us small menus. There weren’t that many choices, but the few available promised to be “special recipes found nowhere else on Medusa”: a Cerberan algae steak, an unusual Charon fruit plate, and other Warden specialties, including some meat dishes, I noted. The menu bragged that nothing used was synthetic. I doubted that, but at least such a declaration meant they’d try hard to make you believe it. The prices were fairly reasonable, so when the waitress suggested a special Lilith wine I looked at Ching, then sprang for it.

Frankly, I was surprised at the suggestion, considering our obvious youth. The wine arrived and was poured from a small wooden flask. I picked mine up, looked at Ching, and smiled. “Ever had alcohol before?”

“No,” she admitted, “but I’ve always been curious about it.”

“Well, you’ll know why you haven’t. Try it.” I sipped mine, and she drank hers as if it were a glass of water, then made a curious face. “It tastes—funny.”

It was actually a very good wine, considering I had no idea what it was fermented from, that tasted like a high-class white from the civilized worlds. “You don’t like it?”

“No—I mean, yes. It’s just—different.” The waitress was soon back to take our order, and we gave it and relaxed. It occurred to me that either the wine or something in the food might contain a drug, but that didn’t worry me. I expected it.

I looked over at Ching, who was already looking a little glassy-eyed and just smiling and staring at me. She was small and alcohol was new to her and would hit her. She sighed, “I feel real good. Relaxed.” She reached for the flask, poured more wine, and drank it fairly quickly. I was still sipping my first glass, of course, feeling fairly human and normal for the first time since I woke up on that prison ship.

Whoever this Opposition was, they were a most civilized underground. While whatever it was, was somewhere in the meal, they let us finish it before our consciousness just sort of faded out without either of us even noticing. Half expecting it, I could have established mental defenses to block the effects—but that would have defeated the whole plan anyway.

I awoke in a smelly tunnel, with several dark forms hovering near me. The place smelled really cruddy, like raw sewage, and it took no brains at all to figure out that I was somewhere down in the drainage system under the city.

Whatever they used was no more than a light hypnotic; I could break it fairly easily, but that wasn’t something Tarin Bul was supposed to be able to do, and so I simply rearranged my mind-set while keeping myself under at about the same level as the drug or whatever—but with autohypnosis replacing the substance. If agents could be subdued by such simple chemical means there’d be no use breeding them and training them so extensively.

I could not quite make out the dark shapes, even though they were very close. Either they wore some all-encompassing black hooded garments or they were using some sort of disrupter field.

“He wakes to level one,” a woman’s voice said.

“It is time, then,” another—a gruff man’s voice—responded. “Here—let me check.” He kneeled down very close to me, and a black, ghostly arm and hand opened one of my eyes, checked my pulse, and did other routine checks. He got back up, seeming satisfied. “It’s okay, Sister 657, you want to take him?”

“Tarin Bul—do you hear us?” the woman’s voice asked softly.

“Yes,” I responded dully.

“You understand that this is your point of no return? That you may tell us now to restore you and nothing more will ever be said nor will you hear from us again? But, if you continue, you are committed to us, and should you compromise or betray the Opposition you will forfeit your life.”

“I understand,” I told them. “I did not come here to turn away.”

They seemed to like that. “Very well,” Sister 657 said, “then rise and follow us.”

I did as instructed, thankfully noting that I had been on a dry wooden platform and not in that gunk below. We were, in fact, walking on catwalks over the river of sludge, somewhere beneath Rochande in a maze even those who worked in it would need a map to negotiate. Not these folks, though; they knew just where they were going. Despite the twists and turns, I was pretty sure I could get back to where we started, but that knowledge did me no good. I had no assurance that that starting spot was anywhere near the café, since I had no idea how long I’d been out.

Finally we made a turn and walked over a temporary catwalk maybe three meters long. It led to an opening in the tunnel wall beyond which was a dimly lit room full of maintenance equipment. Several more dark shapes were in evidence, perhaps a dozen in all including my captors, which was a good thing. With all the ropes and probes and cables and patch can about, there wouldn’t be room in the place for many more.

They sat me down on a crate in front of them, whereupon I relaxed. The stuff they gave me would be out of my system by now anyway, and they’d be the first to realize that.

Sister 657 seemed to be the leader. Nice touch, that, just the camaraderie title and a simple number. The odds were that her number made her very high up indeed—I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that the numbers referred to cell and city and only one to the individual’s within the cell.

“Behold a possible brother,” Sister 657 intoned. I hoped I wasn’t in for a night of silly mumbo-jumbo and secret lodge stuff. “We give him the number 6137. He is awake, alert, and open to questions.”

“Brother—why do you want to oppose the government?” a woman in the back asked me.

“It’s pretty dull,” I responded, which got a few chuckles.

“Brother—why do you wish to join us?” another woman asked.

“You recruited me,” I pointed out. “Right now you’re the only game in town, so, okay, I’ll join up. But I really don’t know what you stand for, and maybe your ideas on running Medusa are worse than the government’s.”

Some whispers around, as if I’d said something I shouldn’t, but I intended to be blunt. What little I could pick out seemed to concern how cocksure and self-confident I was for one so young.

“He makes a good point,” Sister 657 broke in, defusing the whispers. “We have told him nothing of ourselves. Perhaps we should before going any further.” She turned to me. “Brother 6137, we don’t bother with oaths, handshakes, or ceremonies. That’s for the superstitious masses. However, I should tell you that, like most groups of this sort, we are more united in our opposition to the current government than we are in what to replace it with. Still, a lot more can be done with this world than this society permits, and it can be done effectively without having the government watch you go to the bathroom. We are strong, powerful, and well-positioned; but the means of overthrow has, as yet, eluded us. Right now we concentrate on getting recruits, gaining as much technical information on the local level as possible in each place, and establishing ourselves in each major population center on Medusa. It is a start.”

I nodded. “But you can just as easily become a powerful debating society,” I pointed out. “Look, I was born and bred to politics. Had things gone differently for me, in a few years I’d have been in planetary administration instead of sitting here waiting on passengers. Don’t patronize me or think of me as a kid. I leave that to the people I want to underestimate me. For example, I think you should know that TMS knows you’re in Rochande and put me out as bait.”

There was a lot of shuffling and gasping at that one. Finally the leader asked, “Are you sure you know what you just said?”

I nodded. “Why hide it? You snuffed one of theirs and they got some information from another, and I was the logical bait. So they bumped me to a job that would bring me here. Frankly, I was getting sick and tired waiting for you people.”

“He admits to working for TMS!” a woman almost shouted. “Remove him—now!”

“If I were a really effective TMS agent or plant the last thing I would have done would have been to tell you what I just did,” I pointed out—falsely, as a matter of fact. The outburst worried me. Amateurs. Damned play-at-revolution amateurs! I had hoped for better.

“And will you tell TMS that you have contacted us, and joined us?” Sister 657 asked.

I nodded. “Sure. And you’ll have to cook up something occasionally for me to feed that stonelike major or they’ll pick me up and put me under a psych machine. They did that to one of your own—I don’t know any names—a few months back, another newcomer like me, breaking her mind. I don’t want anything like that happening to me, so if you’re as powerful as you say you are I expect protection.”

The man—possibly the only male other than myself—rose for the first time. “You make good sense, young man. You are very clever. Perhaps too clever. I almost wonder about you. The Cerberans, it is said, can make robots in any shape or form that cannot be told from humans. Ones that can assume the characteristics of any of the four Warden worlds.”

“I’m no robot,” I assured him, “but that information interests me.” I paused, as if thinking over some weighty matters, then showed by my face and manner that I had made a decision. “In point of fact, I’m going to tell you something that isn’t even on my records. Something Medusa, and, I suspect, Halstansir doesn’t really know. I was a ringer back home. I didn’t come out of the administrative breeding pool nor out of their schools. Do you think a high-class administrator could have managed to get into a reception and chop off a top politician’s head with a sword? No, for reasons that are old history and have no business with you or anybody else any more, I came out of the assassin’s pool.”

There. A nice white lie that allowed me to be a little more of myself while at the same time protected my real identity and purpose. Who knows? My logic was so good maybe the kid had been from my old school at that. I’d like to think so. It disturbs me that an amateur could have pulled off that job so neatly.

And they bought it, hook, line, and sinker, just because it did make good sense. My first meeting, and already I’d engineered at least a social promotion for myself. As I said, amateurs.

“This explains a lot about you and your manner,” Sister 657 said. “If this is so, then you are a far more valued recruit than I—we—had originally hoped for.” Interesting slip, that. It implied that I knew her and she knew me, and I didn’t know that many older folks on Medusa. She seemed unaware of her slip, though, and continued.

“Our time is run for this matter,” she told us. “I propose we administer a small hypnotic and replace him at the café. Later, this week or early next, 6137, you will be called to the company psych for a routine check. There one of our people will add her own little bit to your testing, and we will check out your facts. If you prove out, then you will join our group, leaving for meetings in the same manner, but without the drug, from various small cafés. Objections?”

I shook my head. “Not on the psych stuff, no. But I suggest we continue to use the Gringol, at least for me. It wouldn’t make any sense at all to compromise other cafés and similar places, since I am both being watched and obliged to report to TMS. Everybody else can use different spots—but keep me on the café. Eventually they’ll put a transmitter on me somewhere, probably one I know about and one I won’t, but I assume you have some kind of scanning for that sort of thing. If not, the next time or two, I’ll show you how to build one. They’ll assume any failure in the gadgets is your doing, anyway.”

“Why do I feel we just joined him?” a woman in the front said grumpily.

I smiled.

They were smooth, I’ll say that. Ching had passed out, but with the careful administering of additional doses of the hypnotic—a native plant, since anything else would be quickly negated by the Wardens—she was hardly aware that time passed at all. Nicely susceptible to the hypnotics, as most people are, she accepted a reasonable romantic scenario set in and near the café that, the Opposition assured me, would be supported in TMS records.

I dutifully keyed in the major on the terminal later that night, and, sure enough, the next day, after returning to Gray Basin and getting something to eat, TMS had another “random pickup,” this tune of both of us, although we were separated, once at headquarters.

The major, whose name, I learned, was Hocrow, was more than interested in my account, which, no doubt, was being checked and verified by countless scanners and sensors. No doubt, indeed—because she not only had a chair for me this time, she insisted I sit in it. Still, I had no worries about them, either—not only could I control just about all my important bodily indicators to make those machines read any way I wanted, I insured things by telling nothing but the truth, leaving out, of course, some of the inconvenient details.

“We have monitors along that whole area under the café, and in every maintenance room,” the major grumbled, “and we did a total check when it was obvious you could have gone nowhere else. They showed nothing. How is it possible?”

“One sewer looks exactly like another,” I pointed out, “and most of it is totally uninhabited most of the time. It’s pretty easy to patch in and substitute an old recording of a sewer doing what sewers do.”

She nodded. “And all the monitors are on one cable down there, to save money. I could make them all independent, which would compound their troubles no end, but that would be a rather obvious ploy.”

“Not to mention the fact that, unless you did it to the whole city, something that would not only be obvious but would cost a fortune and disrupt the place for months, they could just move to a different sewer. But surely you already knew they were in the sewers.”

“We did. It is the most logical place, anyway. But any attempt to breach that cable should set up all sorts of flags in Control.”

“Well, there are two possibilities there. One is that they have somebody in Control who can be at just the right spot to cover up this sort of thing when needed. The second possibility is that you’ve simply been outclassed technically.

This system of yours is pretty sophisticated, but it would be easy for a Confederacy tech team to beat and you know that better than I do.”

“Are you suggesting that the Confederacy is behind this group?”

“It seems likely—but indirectly. Maybe they supply the smarts from someplace like the picket ship or their own satellites, but the people are home-grown. I don’t know—for all their technical wizardry, they seemed to me like kids playing a game, sort of a more dangerous version of trying to beat the automatic doors on the buses and trains. They’re playing at revolution, at least the ones I saw were.”

Hocrow looked at me strangely for a moment. “Is what you told them about actually being a bred assassin true?”

“Yeah, it’s true. Big money was paid, too. I was a long-range hidden gun in a power play my father planned. They got the jump on him before he was ready or I was old enough to be a factor, and I admit I was too young—too emotional—then.”

“Then you wouldn’t avenge your father’s death if it happened now?”

“Oh, sure I would—but I wouldn’t have been caught.”

She mulled that over, just sitting there, looking up at the ceiling for quite some time. Finally she nodded to herself. “That’s what was bothering me so much about you before. It fits. It explains a lot.” She gave that icy smile again. “It seems you are misplaced. You should be in TMS.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I thought I was. Otherwise, what are we doing here?”

She sighed. “One thing does bother me. If you have your preliminary training and all that special design, how will we ever know which side you are really on?”

I chuckled. “No matter what, I have limited experience. If you and your entire staff of monitors, psychs, and the like can’t be sure of me, then your system’s too shaky to have any hope of long-term survival anyway. Either you can do the job or you should give it up.”

That was blunt, almost daring talk, but it was also guaranteed to play directly to a solid cop’s ego because, frankly, it was true. The fact that I was trained to beat any system didn’t mean I couldn’t be beat. It only meant they had to be up to the job.

“Now, what about this psych exam?” I asked her. “Can you get me by it?”

“It should be relatively easy for someone with your supposed abilities,” she mocked. “Still, we can do a little reinforcing before you leave here, with your help. I have a tech on call.”

“That’ll do,” I told her. “But you’re not going to do anything crazy like pick up any of the café staff, are you? They all have to be in on it, at least in another cell that supports mine. I’d just trail and track ’em, if possible. My own intention is to make myself invaluable enough to the organization that I’ll be passed ever upward. If everybody’s as amateurish as these people, you have no real problem, only an irritant. So what if they can play games with the system as long as they’re still trapped in it? But if, at the top levels, there’s somebody or some group really able to use what they’ve got, then I want to meet them.”

She looked at me with those steely eyes. “Why?”

I grinned. “Because I want your job. Because, maybe, I’d like to be First Minister before I’m forty. Or, maybe, the guy who tells the First Minister what to do.”

“Ambitious, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. “I’m young.”