Cerberus: A WOLF IN THE FOLD (14 page)

 
"I am," Dylan responded glumly.

 
"Look, let's go through the key rehearsal now. Just think about this, both of you. If it works, you, Dylan, will have your own boat under .nobody's supervision and no real worries—independent and secure. And you, Sanda, I promise—if all goes as planned, we're going to liberate you from the motherhood and do it so slickly that nobody will bat an eyelash. If you can be patient and not jump the gun, the three of us might wind up running this damned world in a couple of years."

 
Neither of them believed that, but they believed in me and that was enough. It usually was. Only this time, for a change, I wasn't just pulling a con to set up a mission. I really meant business.

 
"Now, let's see what sort of hypnotic subjects you are," I said.

 
Sanda went under quickly and easily. Dylan resisted somewhat, and I could understand why and sympathize with her. After a long struggle she was who and what she wanted to be. Hypnosis was a threat to that. It took a good deal of smooth and soothing talk finally to get her to the point where she was willing.

 
Sanda had romance to gain and absolutely nothing to lose in this whole business—if we weren't caught on the spot. Dylan, on the other hand, had relatively little to gain but was risking all that she held dear in this business. She was'n't really doing this for herself, but for me, and I knew it.

 
I knew the routine well from past operations and had had a lot of practice. I'd also used Tooker's computers to do a lot of medical research on exactly how to handle this particular ticklish business, but actually doing so would not be easy.

 
Being there alone in a boat lounge with two attractive women in deep hypnosis was something of a kinky turn-on, but that feeling passed in a minute. This was business. In the Confederacy there were drugs and devices that could do this much better. But I was prevented from using the first by the Warden organism and didn't have access to the second. That's why we learned hypnosis from the start. You never had the right stuff around when you really needed it.

 
They both seemed to be asleep in their chairs, and I went over to Dylan first. "Dylan, you will listen to my voice and nothing else, listen and trust me and.do exactly as I say. Do you understand?"

 
"Yes."
Sleepily, faraway.

 
"Answer my questions truthfully, Dylan."

 
"I will."

 
"Would you ever betray me or my mission?"

 
"I don't think so."

 
"Dylan, why are you willing to do this?"

 
"Because you want it."

 
"But why is that so important? Why should you take risks for me?"

 
"Because I—"

 
"Yes?"

 
"I think I love you."

 
Love.
A fascinating word and feeling.
One I had used many times but still didn't quite understand
myself
. Certainly love was usually an abstract concept on Cerberus.

 
"You
do
love me, don't you?"

 
"Yes."

 
"Very much.
Very deeply.
More than you've ever loved anyone, more than you love yourself."

 
"Yes."

 
"You would trust me with your body, even your life."

 
"Yes."

 
"And I could trust you with my body, my life."

 
"You could."

 
I moved over to Sanda and repeated some of the process.

 
"Would you betray us or our mission?"

 
"No," she assured me.
"Never."

 
"Have you told anyone in the House about this?"

 
"No."

 
"Has anyone there suspected you were up to something? Asked questions?"

 
"One or two."

 
"And what did you tell them?"

 
"I said I was in love with you and that you were in love with me."

 
"Did they believe you and press no more?"

 
"They were envious," she told me. "They ask me about you."

 
"And what do you tell them?"

 
"I tell them you came from Outside and you work for Tooker."

 
"And what else?"

 
The next segment was more than a little embarrassing to me personally. The romantic fantasies this lonely and bored young woman had concocted were graphic and hard to believe, and the image of me as someone approaching godhood was beyond any technique I'd ever studied. Still, it was satisfactory. They would understand those fantasies for what they were and put down a lot of her nervous excitement to meeting me.

 
Her emotional patterns were at once simpler and more complex than Dylan's or the average person's. She loved, truly
loved,
Dylan, but she worshiped me.

 
Confederacy agents are born and bred to their jobs and are as perfect as the biological and social sciences can make them for doing whatever needs to be done.

 
As a youngster in the game I'd been amazed at how easily people could be turned, how malleable they were in emotions and will if only the right words were said at the right times, the right buttons pushed. It was something I'd never really thought about, something that came almost instinctively. Even now it still amazed me. Two women were in love with me and were willing to risk their necks and who knew what else for me.

 
Even when they
knew,-as
Dylan knew, they still went along. And yet standing there looking at the two women, I felt something that I had never really felt before, the stirrings of care, of concern, of real affection and approciation for these two. Perhaps, I reflected, not quite understanding myself, I too could love. But business came first.

 
I almost held my breath before this next one, since without it the whole thing would fall and have to be postponed. And time was running out on Turgan Sugal, and therefore on me.

 
I had them
both open
their eyes and rise, facing me. I instructed them to turn and face each other.

 
"Feel inside
yourselves
," I instructed. "Feel your mind. Feel the Wardens in your mind, calling out, connecting you one to the other, talking to each other mind to mind. Think of nothing else, concentrate on nothing else, but feel, hear, as they reach out, your mind to the other. Can you feel it?"

 
"Yes," they both answered in unison. "Dylan, you wish to be in Sanda's.body. You wish it more than anything else in the world. It is a beautiful body, not a mother's body, and it is the ideal body you have always dreamed of. You want to be in that body. Flow into it, Dylan. Become Sanda's.
body
. Sanda, you will not resist. You
want
to exchange bodies with Dylan. You will flow into hers as she into yours. And when your bodies have changed, you will both go back and sit in your chairs, still in a deep hypnotic sleep."

 
Apparently
When
both were hypnotized and so instructed the exchange went more quickly and smoothly than in the "natural" way. Or so the computers had told me, although they also warned that, once complete, it would take another ten minutes or so to set in. Actually, although consciously the exchange was complete at that point, it took up to seventy-two hours for a true set, but that wasn't what I was after. All I wanted was a mental exchange, no more.

 
In less than ten minutes both women moved—and sat in each other's chairs. Dylan was now Sanda, and Sanda was now Dylan.

 
I went over to the new Dylan. "Dylan? Can you hear me?" "Yes."

 
"Now, listen carefully. Soon I will awaken you, but you will still remain in a deep hypnotic sleep, even though awakened. And when you awaken, you will do the following exactly..."

 
Although I was a master of autohypnosis and had even gotten to the point of sensing the Wardens inside my own body, this was a bit too tricky to trust just to myself.
So when she awakened, I allowed her to put
me
under, and the process was repeated, with me going into Dylan's old body and Sanda into mine.
We were than all awakened, still under, and were able to compare notes, reactions, and the like. It looked like complete conscious control even in the short time allowed, and that satisfied me. We switched back again and Dylan brought me out, then I brought the two of them out, along with some handy posthypnotic suggestions. The suggestions wouldn't last more than a day or two, but tended to be of the self-reinforcing type, in which each of them would put herself under and repeat quite a lot over and over. It was an advanced form of hypnosis with limited use, but it was more than handy for memorizing things to do and to calm nerves.

 
All that afternoon we went over the plan again and again, until I was satisfied that all three of us had what we were to do down pat. Sanda had received permission to spend the night on the boat as long as she was in safe and enclosed quarters—their organization was run by a few incurable romantics, too—and we had a fancy dinner sent down from town which we ate.on the aft deck.

 
"One thing puzzles me," Dylan remarked. "It seems to me you had all the elements to make this plan first. Which came first—the elements or the plan?"

 
I laughed.
"The elements, of course.
The plan was tailored for what I
could
do and what my friends, associates, and close partners—you two—could do. It was a matter of stating the problem when it Came up—Sugal's subtle forced ouster—and then putting together all I had, all that I could have, and matching it up to the chinks Fd already found in this society's armor. So far it's all worked out—but if my research was wrong and something doesn't go right, well, 111 try a different plan. Plans are easy—this one took only a few minutes—but execution's the hard part, since you never really know what's possible until you try it. Like tonight."

 
Tonight would be yet another test, really, and it would depend on me more than anything. All those two had to do was go to sleep, shielded from each other. I'd have a more difficult task, and all my plans and theories depended on it. It was logical, my computers told me, but there wasn't much medical evidence to back it up—for obvious reasons, I knew.

 
Which is why I sat, in a deep but aware hypnotic trance, in the same room as Dylan but unshielded—yet a good five meters from her bed.
Sat and reached out and felt the creatures in my mind. It was an eerie sensation, really. There was no sight, sound, or smell to betray the Warden organism, but when you were deeply under— and occasionally while you were in a really deep sleep— you could hear them, sense them, talking.

 
Not talking in any sense that we understand, but there was some sort of communication, some sort of linkage, as if one could sense the individual cells comparing information elsewhere.
An energy network, intangible, invisible, yet very much there, creating a sense of linkage not only between minds but between literally
everything
solid around you.

 
Under hypnotic control I was able to tune out much of it, all but Dylan's sleeping form, which seemed almost to
burn
with the tiny tendrils of immeasurably small energy linking one Warden organism to another. I could feel myself being almost physically drawn to her, interconnecting with every part of her body, Unking mind to mind, arms to arms,
legs
to legs, heart to heart. At this point, more deep than I'd ever been, I understood a bit more how those on Lilith must feel who could command, send messages through that network. One could also wonder, too, how such a creature as the Warden could have evolved, how it could possibly exist at all, on worlds otherwise not so different from many man had conquered, and far less alien than most. What are you? Who are you? Why do you exist?

 
And there seemed to be a faint answer somewhere, from all around.

 
We existl
We
live! We arel
That
is enough!

 
Dylan had gone from lighter, dream-filled sleep to that period people went through several times a night.
Rigid, deep, dreamless.
Her Wardens burned bright, talking,
singing along fields of invisible force—
hers to mine and mine to hers. And for the first time conscious as it happened, we changed. It was a strange experience, but not a terrifying one. There was something eerily satisfying about it, my body building up a tension and then the core of my being flowing along those fields of force toward that sleeping body and the core of hers to mine, providing a wondrous feeling I could not then and can not now describe.