Cerberus: A WOLF IN THE FOLD (4 page)

 
I looked around and spotted the most obvious easily. 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 what sort of room I was in.

 
It was 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 looked down at my body. Looked down—and got what I think is the greatest shock of my life.

 
A woman's body.
A Confederacy-standard woman at that.
At that moment a tremendous shock and revulsion ran through me. First and foremost I was most solidly and assuredly male and liked things that way, but, worse, that body told me the most horrible of facts. I was not the original but a surrogate.
I'm one of them!
I thought in sheer panic. 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 to anger and frustration. Not only was this female body foreign to me and my personality, but that very mind and personality wasn't real but a copy, an imitation of somebody else entirely, somebody still around, alive, possible monitoring my every move, perhaps my every thought. I hated him then, hated him with a pathological force beyond reason. He would sit there comfortable and safe, in his man's body, watching me work, watching me do it all—and, when the mission 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, hold 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 in any event at the completion of the assignment just for insurance's sake.

 
Well, I told myself, the system worked both ways. I knew how
he
thought, how
they
thought. This monitoring worked both ways. I was going to be a tough son of a bitch to kill. No, I thought, suddenly morose once more, not son. Did I in fact
want
to live the rest of my life in this body? I really didn't know. Not now, certainly—and not ever, deep down. And yet the tiniest of suspicions rested in the back of my mind that my attitude might be just what they had in mind.
The perfect double trap for me.
If that was the case, they were mistaken. If I began believing for one minute that they did this to me just so I wouldn't want to outlive my .mission, I'd live a thousand years just to spite them. There was probably no such plot, though, I knew. Either they had an ulterior motive having to do with the mission that caused this, or they just didn't consider it one way or the other. I wished I knew.

 
But what about now, in any event?
For now I'd bide my time, hold my peace, and adjust as best I could. Odd, in a way, how very
ordinary
and
normal
I felt. Arms, legs, head, all in the same places. A lot lighter in weight, yes, .but that was relative; and being a-little weaker in the arms wasn't anything you really noticed, particularly not in a barren prison cell. Only occasionally did I feel protrusions where none had been before, or the lack of some thing that had always been there. I knew here in an isolated cell I wouldn't be aware of the differences. Only later, down there, on whatever hellhole they dumped me, around lots of other people—
then
things would get rough.

 
I was very dry after
waking ,and
located a small water tap and cup in the wall just above the basin. I drank a good deal. Naturally, it went right through me, whereupon I discovered that having to piss was the same feeling only I now had to do it sitting down. I pulled down the toilet and sat and relieved myself—and got!
yet
another shock..

 
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 neural program, but it allowed them to talk to me in total privacy, even send me pictures only I could see and hear.

 
"I hope by now you are over the initial shock of
who
and what you are," Krega's voice came to me, so loud and clear it seemed impossible that none of the monitors could hear. "As you recall, the Merton Process of personality transfer is rather wasteful of bodies—roughly thirty die for one take, as it were—and of the first four that did take, one was this woman. We decided to use her for several reasons. She will put any Warden authorities off their guard if there's been any sort of leak about you, and Cerberus, the planet to which you are being sent, has unique properties that make your sex and age totally irrelevant. To calm you down, I suspect, I should tell you right
off.
that
Cerberans enjoy a natural form of the Merton Process—in fact we got the process partially by studies on Cerberus. In other words, you can expect to change bodies once or often down there, as well as sex, age, and all the rest."

 
I gave a half-startled cry at this thought and stood up, causing the toilet to flap back into the wall and flush. It worried me for a moment that I might have wiped the briefing; but because my old professional self was re-emerging, I knew that I would have to wait before finding out just to ward off any suspicion by my unseen jailers.

 
I walked back to the cot and sat down once again, but my mood had abruptly changed.
Body switchers.
That changed everythingl I was suddenly
alive
again, alive and excited.

 
I'd had some nasty shocks, but the worst one was merely temporary. The other—the discovery that I wasn't who I thought I was but some artificial creation—was still there. The old life, the life I remembered even though I really hadn't personally experienced it, was gone forever. No more civilized worlds, no more casinos and beautiful women and all the money I could spend. And yet, as I sat there, I adjusted. That was why they'd picked me from the start.
My ability to adjust and adapt to almost anything.

 
Memory, thought, personality—those were the individual, not the body that intelligence wore. /
was still mel
This was no different than a biological disguise of a particularly sophisticated sort As to whom 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 at 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 one, the created me. He, that nonentity playboy that presently did not exist, was the artificial personality. The real me was bottled up in storage in their psychosurgical computers and allowed to come out only when they needed it—and for good reason. Unlocked, I was as much a danger to the power structure as I was to whoever 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 this time—and now I was sure I would not permit them to kill me, either. Suddenly I no longer felt hatred toward that other me out there someplace. In fact I found I could no longer feel much of anything for him at all. When this was all over he'd be wiped once more—perhaps killed himself if my brother agents on the Diamond and I found out too much. At best he'd return to being that stagnant milquetoast. Not me. I'd still be here, still live on, the
real
one.
A whole person.
I would be 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, by robot satellite and without qualms. But my vulnerability would only last a short time—even less on Cerberus than elsewhere, since they would have to find out
who I
was as well and without the aid of biotracers or any other physiological gadget. I wondered how they were going to get me to report. I remembered Krega saying something about a thing implanted in the brain, but the moment I switched bodies that was useless. Probably there was some deep psychocommand to report, perhaps with the aid of agents or paid accomplices on Cerberus. I would get to that matter when I could. Until then, I'd do their dirty work for them. I had no choice, as they undoubtedly knew. During that vulnerable stage—who knew how long?—I was their property. 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 when you felt nothing about the cause, 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 directly, since I would be trapped on a Warden world from now on. If the aliens won the coming confrontation, the Wardens would survive as allies. If they lost—well, it would only maintain the status quo. This reduced the alien question to an abstract problem for me and made my situation perfect.

 
The other assignment created a similar situation. Seek out the Lord of Cerberus and kill him if I could. In a sense doing so would be more difficult, since I'd be operating on unfamiliar ground and would therefore require time and possibly allies;
Another
challenge. If I get him, I'd only increase my power and position on Cerberus. If he got me instead, then I wouldn't give a damn because I'd be dead. But the thought of losing is abhorrent to me. That set the contest in the best terms, from my point of view. Track-down assassination was the ultimate game, since you won or you died and never had to live with the thought that you'd lost.

 
It suddenly occurred to me that the only real difference that probably existed between me and this 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 it. Perfect again. Dead heat on moral grounds.

 
The only thing that really bothered me was the disadvantage of not having a psychoprogram with everything I needed to know all neatly laid out for me in my mind. Probably, I thought, they hadn't done it this time because they'd had me on the table in four new bodies with four separate missions, and the transfer process to a .new body was hard enough without trying to add anything afterward. Still, the omission put me in a deep pit. I sure hoped that the rest of that contact briefing recording hadn't wiped when I'd gotten up. It would be all I had.

 
Food came—a hot tray of tasteless muck with a thin plastic fork and knife that would dissolve into a sticky puddle in an hour or so,
then
dry up into a talclike powder.
Standard for prisoners.

 
This being my first meal in some tune, it wasn't long before I had to go once again, and so I faced convincingly my moment of truth with the toilet that talked.

 
"Now, as to this process"—Krega's voice, picking up right where we left off, gave me a tremendous feeling of relief—"we had to brief you this way because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Don't worry about it, though—it's permanent. We just prefer to allow as much tune as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock. Besides, we haven't the time to allow you to completely 'set in,' as it were. This will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel you have the trickiest task of the four."

 
I felt the old thrill creep in. The challenge . . . the challenge!

 
"As I said, your objective world is Cerberus. Like all the Diamond colonies, Cerberus is a madhouse. Third out from the Warden sun of die four Warden
worlds
, it is subject to seasons and ranges from a tropical equatorial zone to frozen polar caps. The most peculiar thing from a physical standpoint about the world is that it is a water world with no above-surface land masses. It is, however, a world abundant in life. The geological history is unknown, but apparently the sea covering was quite stow and the massive numbers of plants in its distant geological past kept their heads above water, so to speak. Thus almost half of the surface is covered with giant plants interwoven into complex networks, some with trunks tens of kilometers around—necessary support, since they are rooted in the seabed from a hundred meters to an impossible two to three kilometers below- The cities and towns of Cerberus are built atop these plants.

 
"No additional physical descriptions will be adequate, and you will be well briefed below by the governing officials upon landing. However, we feel a complete physical-political map would be useful and are thus going to imprint that map on your mind now."

 
I felt a sharp back pain, then a wave of dizziness and nausea that quickly cleared. Whereupon I found that I did in fact have a detailed map of the entirety of Cerberus in my head. It would be very handy. There followed a fast stream of facts on the place. It was roughly 40,000 kilometers around the equator, and its gravity was 1.02
norm
, so close I'd hardly notice it. Equatorial and summer temperatures were a pleasant 26 to 27 degrees centigrade, mid-latitude spring and fall were between 12 and 13 degrees centigrade, chilly but not uncomfortable, and polar regions and mid-latitude winters could drop as low as 25 below, although the sea cover and the location of settlements along warm currents that the great plants also followed usually kept it well above that and relatively ice-free even in the worst of times.