Cerberus: A WOLF IN THE FOLD (10 page)

 
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 caf£ 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!" 1
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 |i with another comin' in six months, and I'm already
tl
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—ft 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.

CHAPTER FIVE -
A Glimmer of a Plan

Over
the next few weeks I continued to meet with Sanda, whom I not only felt sorry for but genuinely liked. She seemed to enjoy the company of someone from a place she would never see and a background she could hardly imagine—one who treated her as a person, not a pariah. I was, however, becoming restless and a little impatient. By this point I felt I had enough contacts and enough elements put together to get into action. But I lacked the proper starting point, the opening I needed to have any chance of success.

 
My long-range objective was clear: locate and kill Wa-gant Laroo, then somehow assume political control of the syndicalist machinery that would allow me to retailor this world for the better. The fact that my plan dovetailed with the wishes of the Confederacy was all to the good, since I didn't want any problems from that quarter and I knew that somehow they were keeping tabs on me, probably with the aid of blackmailable agents down here —exiles with family or something else to lose back home.

 
My experience at Tooker convinced me that computer and robotic science on Cerberus was too far behind the Confederacy to be directly linked to the alien robots, but I still had suspicions. At least a few really good minds in the organic computer field had wound up here. Though their names occasionally cropped up in shoptalk at parties and the like, they were nowhere in evidence. Of course Tooker wasn't the only *or even the largest computer firm on Cerberus, but it was definitely a middleweight in the economic mainstream, unlikely to be left out of any major deals. Part of the trouble was I was still too low down in the hierarchical ranks to even hear the tumors of anything so secret.

 
Therefore, several steps had to be taken before I could even consider Laroo, one being I first had to make friends in high places
who
could be of help with such information as well as with favors. I also needed considerably more money than I had or could easily make—and some way to conceal it if I
could
figure out a way. Not that I couldn't steal money from banks-—that was relatively easy with this computer system. The trouble was
,
money had to be put somewhere. In an all-electronic currency system it would show a conspicuous bulge. To disguise a stash properly would take a major operation with major resources. In other words, it would take a fortune to steal and hide a fortune.

 
Finally, after money and influence, I'd need somebody on the inside of Laroo's top operation. No mean trick. But that was the last of my problems and was contingent on the other two.