Cerberus: A WOLF IN THE FOLD (5 page)

 
A day was 23.65 standard hours, close enough to cause no major disruptions in my biological schedule, a pretty normal environment—if you liked water, anyway.

 
Cerberus was industrialized—I could hardly wait to see factories in the treetops—but lacked heavy metals or easily obtainable hard resources of any sort. Most of its ore and other needed industrial materials came from Medusa in exchange for finished
goods,
and from mines on the many moons of a gas giant much farther out. While technological, the Confederacy kept close tabs on what was built on Cerberus, and the industry, though good, was for-cibily kept in obsolete channels. In effect this was the best of
news,
since there wouldn't be a machine on Cerberus I didn't know intimately or couldn't get complete details on from above. To ensure some technological retardation, there was the Warden organism, whose fancy name nobody used or remembered. It got into literally
everything,
right down to the molecules in a grain of sand, and it resisted "imported" materials—that is, materials that did not also have Warden
organisms
inside. Thanks to early exploration spreading the contagion from Lilith, this meant not only the four Warden worlds but, to my surprise, the seven barren but mineral-rich moons of the ringed giant Momrath, outside the zone of life. For some reason the Warden bug could still live were no others could, even way out there, but no further. Beyond Momrath the things died as they did going out-system.

 
"The Lord of Cerberus is Wagant Laroo," Krega's voice went on. "He was an important Confederacy politician until about thirty years ago, when he grew too ambitious and forgot his sacred oaths, taking his sector from the paths of civilization into his own private kingdom. As befitted his position and former contributions to the Confederacy, he was given the option of death or Warden
exile
; he chose the latter. He is a megalomaniac with delusions of godhood, but do not underestimate bun. He has one of the most brilliant organizational minds the Confederacy ever produced, and it is coupled with total amorality and absolute ruthlessness. His power and rule extend far beyond Cerberus, for many antisocials within the Confederacy use Cerberus as a storehouse for hidden records, location of'loot, and even the storage of'blackmail. I fear I must warn you that, if the impossible happened and there was 'some sort of leak about you, he will know of it. No security is perfect, and this possibility must be considered."

 
I nodded to myself. Despite Krega's patriotic phrasing, few if any top Confederacy politicians were immune to scandal or blackmail on some level, and this guy was a master. • •

 
"Finding Laroo might well be impossible," Krega warned. "Cerberus has the Warden organism, but it is a mutated strain. More of this will be explained on orientation, but you must trust to the fact that bodies are as interchangeable as clothes on Cerberus. So even if you saw Laroo, had
him
pointed out to you and shook his hand, you could not be absolutely certain it was really he, and even less certain that it would still be he days, hours, even minutes later."

 
That didn't really bother me much. For one thing, if Laroo had this kind of dictatorial control somebody always had to know who he was or he couldn't give the orders and expect to be obeyed. Furthermore, a man like that would love the actual trappings and exercise of power. Then too, Laroo couldn't be at all certain who / might be a few minutes, days, or weeks later, either.

 
"At last count there were approximately 18,700,000 people on Cerberus," Krega went on. "This is not a large population, but it has a very high growth rate. There are more jobs and space than people even now.
Since the advent of Laroo's rule the population has been expanding at a rate that almost doubles it every twenty years or so.
We believe that only part of this population push is economic, though. Much of it, we think, is because, on a world of body switchers, the potential for immortality exists if there is a constant and available supply of young bodies. Laroo seems to have some control over this process, which is the ultimate political leverage. Naturally, this also means that, short of being killed, Laroo could literally rule forever."

 
Immortality, I thought, and the idea sounded very pleasant. How long will
you
live, my other original self? I, sir, had an infinite answer to that one. Perhaps this was not such a terrible assignment after all.

 
Krega had a lot more routine stuff for me, but finally the lecture was over and I simply got off the John and heard it flush. The next time I used it, I discovered that this time the message had been flushed as well. Because it had been a direct neural transmission, even with the interruption, it had taken only a minute or two for the whole thing.

 
Efficient, the Security boys, I told myself. Even my ever-vigilant jailers on the other end of those lenses and mikes would have no idea I was anybody other than who I was supposed to be.

 
As to
who
I was, that had come in a rush as well. I was Qwin Zhang, forty-one, former freighter loadmaster and expert smuggler, a virtuoso of the computerized loading and inspection system. A technological crook—that fit many of my own skills perfectly.

 
I
lay
back on the cot and put myself in a slight trance to better sort out the information I'd received. Qwin
did
bother me a bit. I could follow her life and career without ever really getting a handle on her. Born and bred to her job, normal Confederacy upbringing, no signs of any deviation from the normal path millions of others followed, the path set out for them from birth that they were not only
expected
to follow but
designed
to follow. I mentally followed the steps in her routine life and found nothing unusual, nothing to show what I was looking for.

 
And yet she stole. Stole expertly, methodically, and efficiently, even using the computer routing systems not only to shave cargo loads but actually to misdeliver them to waiting fencing operations out on the frontier. Stole almost from the start of her career, and so well she
Was
caught only when a freak accident on a freighter with a bit more cargo than it was supposed to have caused a total inventory and alerted Security. She'd been probed and poked and studied, but there seemed little there. She'd stolen because she could, because the opportunity was there. She felt no guilt, no remorse for^ this "crime against civilization," and didn't seem to have any clear idea of what she would one day do with all that money had she gotten away with it.

 
Where was the corruption point? I couldn't find it, nor could the psych boys. What dreams had you had, Qwin Zhang? I mused. What event disillusioned you or turned you, from the paths of righteousness?
Some exotic love affair?
If so, it wasn't anywhere to be found in what they gave me. Not much interest or history in sex
Of
any
sort Perhaps the_ answer was there, somewhere in somebody's sexual theories of abnormal psychology, but it didn't really show.

 
Still, she'd been a nonetity. Her crimes depended on that, and such crimes were hidden, never publicized, lest others get ideas. Because she had had a norm body and looks and an average personality, it was unlikely anyone on Cerberus would ever have heard of her. That suited me just fine. The last thing I wanted was to bump into one of her old buddies down there. I wouldn't have the memories to match.

CHAPTER TWO – Transportation and Exposure

Except for regular meals there was no way to keep track of time, but it was a fairly long trip. They weren't wasting any money transporting prisoners by the fastest available
routes, that
was for sure.

 
Finally, though, we docked with the base ship a third of a light-year out from the Warden system. I knew it not so much by any sensation inside my cloister but by the lack of it—the vibration that had been my constant companion disappeared. Still, the routine wasn't varied. I suppose they were waiting for a large enough contingent from around the galaxy to make the final trip worthwhile.

 
All I could do was sit and go over the data again and again until I was comfortable with all of it. I reflected more than once that I probably wasn't very far from my old body (that's how I'd come to think of it). I wondered if he didn't occasionally come down to take a peek at me, at least from idle curiosity—me and the three others who were probably here also.

 
I had time to reflect on my knowledge of the Warden system, the reasons for its perfection, as a prison. I had not, of course, swallowed that line whole—there was no such thing as a perfect prison, but this had to be close. Shortly after I was dropped on Cerberus I'd be infected with an oddball submicroscopic organism that would set up housekeeping in every cell of my body. There it would live, feeding off me, even earning its keep by keeping disease organisms, infections, and the like in check. The one thing that stuff had was a will to live, and it survived only if you did.

 
But it needed something, some trace element or some such that was only present in the Warden system. Nobody knew what and nobody had been able to do any real work to find out, but whatever it needed was found only in the Warden system. The element wasn't in the air, because in shuttles run between the worlds of the Diamond you could breathe the purified, mechanically produced stuff with no ill effects. Not in the food, either. They'd checked that. It was possible for one of the Warden people to live comfortably on synthetics in a totally isolated lab like a planetary space station. But get too far away, even with Warden
food
and Warden air, and the organism died. Since it had modified your cells to make itself at home, and those cells depended on the organism to keep working properly, you died, too—painfully and slowly, in horrible agony. That distance was roughly a quarter of a light-year out-system, which explained the location of the base ship.

 
All four worlds were more than climatologically different, too. The organism was consistent in what it did to you on each planet, but—possibly due to distance from the sun, since that seemed to be the determining factor in its life—it did different things to -you depending on which world you were first exposed to it. Whatever it did stuck in just that fashion even if you later went to a different Warden world.

 
The organism seemed somehow to be vaguely telepathic in some way, although nobody could explain how. It certainly wasn't intelligent; at least it always behaved predictably. Still, most of the changes seemed to involve the colony in one person affecting the colony in another —or others. You provided the conscious control, if you could, and that determined your relative power over others and theirs over you.
A pretty simple system, even if inexplicable.

 
I regretted not knowing more about Cerberus. This war far less briefing information than I was used to, although I understood their caution. It would cost me time, possibly a lot of it» to learn the ropes there and find out everything I needed to know to do my job.

 
About a day after I arrived—four meals' worth—there was a lurching and a lot of banging around that forced me to the cot and made me slightly seasick. Still, I wasn't disappointed; the activity meant they were making up consignments and readying for the in-system drop of these cells. I faced this idea with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I wanted desperately to be out of this little box, which provided nothing but endless, terrible boredom. On the other, when I next got out of the box it would be into a much larger and more attractive cell— the planet Cerberus itself, no less a jail for being an entire planet.

 
Shortly after all the banging started, it stopped. After a short, expectant pause, I felt again a more pronounced vibration than before, indicating movement. Either I was on a much smaller vessel or located nearer the drives.

 
Still, it took another four interminable days, twelve meals, to reach our destination. Long, certainly—but also fast for a sublight carrier, probably a modified and totally automated freighter.

 
The vibration stopped, and I knew we were in orbit Again I had that dual feeling of trapped doom and exhilaration.

 
A crackling sound and a speaker I'd never known was there
came
to life. "Attention, all prisoners," it commanded, its voice a metallic parody of a man's baritone. "We have achieved orbit around die planet Cerberus in the Warden system." For the first time it occurred to me that others were also being sent down—logical, of course, but I'd never really considered it before. I knew what they all must be going through, considering my own feelings. Probably a hundred times mine, since at least I was going in with my eyes open, even if I was no more a volunteer than they had been. I wondered for a fleeting instant about Lord Laroo. Once he too sat here, naked in a common cell, feeling these same feelings and facing the same unknown future as we. He had started as low as I —lower, in fact, as a prisoner—and now he ran the place. Nobody had given the position to him on a platter, nobody had elected him. He'd gone in, naked and isolated as I was, and he'd conquered. And I certainly considered myself superior to such as Wagant Laroo.