Cerberus: A WOLF IN THE FOLD (9 page)

 
The main offices had already closed for the day, but the night staff was very cordial and recommended a nearby hotel for the night. The hotel, entirely in a massive trunk, was modern and luxurious inside. Nervously, I called the Central Banking number to see how much I still had left after all this, and was surprised and relieved to find that I still had 168.72 units in my account.

 
The only unusual thing about the room was that there was a switch in the headboard of the bed with a sign that read: turn before sleeping. I discovered that turning it raised plating around the bed from floor to ceiling, plates of some thin but firm plasticlike substance through which ran metal threads of some sort.

 
Claustrophobia, then, was a real problem on Cerberus. The shield was obviously there to ensure a good night's sleep with no unexpected exchanges. I wondered what sort of distance would be the maximum range for a sleep -exchange and decided I'd have to know that. I asked one of the desk employees about it, and he, upon finding I was new, told me that the shields weren't necessary in the hotel and that almost nobody used them, but they were there because some big shots became .paranoid. Although in some cases, an exchange could take place at up to twenty meters, the walls, floor, and ceiling of all rooms were treated to shield. That made me feel a little better, and I didn't use the shield again that evening.

 
The room vision monitors were no help, since they seemed composed of years-old bad programming from the civilized worlds and some really horrible and amateurish local programming, but I got a print-out of the local paper and looked it over. Not much there, either— not big-city scope at all; more like the vacuous weeklies produced in some rural areas. The only unique item was a small column back with the classifieds for personals and announcements called "switched," followed by a double column of names—maybe a dozen pairs. One way to know who your friends really were here, I reflected.

 
In fact, the ads were the only things of real interest
There
was evidently a small but thriving competitive sector on consumer goods allowed between the corporations, assuring a variety of goods at less than totally uniform prices. On the civilized worlds, of course, there were few brands of anything. For example, the best tested and most recommended toothpaste was everybody's toothpaste, perhaps in three or four flavors, and there were no brands or competition. Here there was, for the first time since I'd been on the frontier, and I found I kind of liked
it .

 
There were also banks, although they were not such full-service institutions as those with which I was familiar. Apparently you could take some of your units out of the master account and place it with a bank at interest, and also borrow money from such banks. There was therefore a semi-independent subeconomy here, and that too was worth noting.

 
Judging from the want ads, Tooker was the big employer, but many other places also advertised, so some movement was possible on one's own. The independent merchants advertised a lot for part-tune help, too, suggesting some economic disparity and also indicating that, even if the executive offices closed in the late afternoon, Tooker operated around the clock in many divisions.

 
To my surprise, some churches were listed—in fact, a fair number of them for just about every belief under the sun, including some new to me that sounded pretty bizarre.
Also part-time schools to better yourself or your position, lots of the usual stuff like that.

 
That brought up a point, and I checked the local phone directory. No schools for the young were listed anywhere, nor were there any headings for day care or other services for children or parents. Obviously I still had gaps to fill in for this new culture.

 
Medlam, being subtropical, seemed to have a number of resorts and tourist-orieiited stuff, including several for "Thrilling Charter Bork Hunts!" whatever a bork was.

 
Interestingly, nowhere, not in the briefing, not in the guide book,
nor
anywhere else was there reference to Wagant Laroo. The Lord of Cerberus certainly kept a low profile.

 
The next day I checked out bright and early and showed up at the Tooker personnel office. They were expecting me and quickly processed me into the corporation. The job was thirty-eight hours a week at 2.75 units per hour, although that could increase up to 9.00 units with seniority in my assistant's position and even more should I move up. I definitely intended on moving up. I was told, too, that I was a Class I Individual, which was reserved for those with special skills. Class I's kept the same job regardless of body. Class IPs kept the same
job
regardless of who was inside the body. There was also a Class III for unskilled workers who could switch jobs if they and their employers agreed—a sort of safety valve, I guessed. Idly I asked what happened if a I and n switched, and was told matter-of-factly that in that case the decision on who did what was made by the government, usually getting judges to switch them back forcibly.

 
"Take my advice if you're the kind that likes switching around," the personnel manager told me. "Switch only with other I's. It's simpler and causes no trouble."

 
"I doubt if I'll do much switching in the near future," I assured him.
"Not voluntarily, anyway."

 
He nodded. "Just remember the possibilities and guard against them, and you never will switch unless you want to, and then only with
whom
you want. And when you're gettin' older and want a new start—well, that's up to you. Stay clean, work hard, and make youself indispensable or at least important—that is the best insurance. Make "em
want
to give you a new body every thirty years or so. That's the best way."

 
I nodded soberly. "Thanks.
Ill
remember
that." Of course I had no intention of settling into a regular routine for that long a time. But I
did
need some time like that, time to get to know people and get to know the world and the society. Patience is the greatest of virtues if you're going to subvert a society, and there's no substitute for preparation.

 
I would like to say that during the next four months I did all sorts of daring and exciting things, but the truth is that there are only brief moments like that in a job like mine—all the rest is boring, plodding stuff. The corporation provided me with subsidized housing—a comfortable tree-lined flat with full kitchen, air conditioning, and the rest that was quite pleasant. The job they started me at was anything but demanding, and the speed with which I "assisted" designers in improving new circuit de/-signs marked me quickly for bigger and better things, particularly since I was careful to let my superiors take the credit while keeping evidence of who really did the work—evidence they knew about. This put them in my debt without my seeming threatening. I could have hogged full credit and had not. In a word, I was becoming indispensable, at least to the next level above me, like the man said. It was child's play, actually, since the designs used on Cerberus were a~ good ten or even twenty years out of date and quite limited in one area. No self-aware computers of any kind were allowed here. That was really the key to retardation in the Warden Diamond, and a clever one on the part of the Confederacy, which was very real, even here. You didn't have to land or even enter the atmosphere to wipe an entire borough off the face of the planet, and they'd do that as an object lesson if they got wind of any bending of the rules.

 
In point of fact, that very primitiveness imposed on the planet aided me over many other technological masterminds, since most or all of them were trained and developed on machines too advanced for here. There were very few of us, really, who could do the utmost with the older designs.

 
I made a number of friends and quickly became a social gadfly. The corporation had a lot of teams competing against other corporate employee teams in just about every sport I knew. After working out regularly and fine-tuning this body I now wore, I excelled at them, as usual, though I was never able to get myself up to the physical peak of my original body.

 
Bork hunting, however, I passed on, at least for the time. It seemed that bork were monstrous, nasty creatures that inhabited the oceans, seemed to be composed entirely of teeth, and occasionally grew large enough to swallow boats whole. They had a natural dislike of everything and everybody and were even known to attack boats just for being
there,
and sometimes, even to snare a low-flying shuttle. Hunting them just required too many specialized skills, arid that sport had no initial appeal for me. Though Work were nasty, the oceans con-tamed an enormous number of creatures that had some commercial uses, from unicellular protein creatures that linked together into floating beds kilometers long to smaller sea creatures that provided edible meat, skins, and other such things. Bork hunting might be a thrill for some, but to the ocean harvesting corporations it was a commercial necessity.

 
The flying creatures with such names as geeks and gops, made me wonder just what sort of person first named all these things. The flying things, mostly small, served the function of insects on other worlds, cross-pollinating this jungle from the top. In addition, there were a few predatory fliers that were monsters, too. One giant flier with a thick barrel-like body about a meter around had a neck more than three meters long and a wingspread of more than ten meters. Its head looked like a nightmare of blazing reptilian eyes and sharp teeth, but nobody much paid attention to them as long as they didn't come too close. These were carrion eaters mostly, and they remained aloft over the oceans much of the time.

 
Body switching was rare, although I was approached once or twice in a casual way. Every once in a while somebody new would show up who would turn out to be somebody old after all. Although few people switched— except for the occasional couple that switched almost nightly, always with each other—the subject was nonetheless a regular topic of conversation in lounges and at parties. The possibility was always there, around you, even if
you,
didn't see it. You were reminded of it con- | stantly when you went home or stayed at a hotel on a I company trip, and you always slept shielded and alone, no matter how friendly or intimate you became with others.

 
There were some topics nobody really referred to, though. One was children—you just didn't discuss it— and second was advancing age. Few people you met looked any older than
forty,
and those who looked the oldest seemed much more jittery and under a lot more pressure than most.

 
Body switching ended any sort of sexual stereotypes, to a greater extent even than on the civilized worlds. When gender could sq easily be exchanged, it seemed silly to think of separate sexual roles, particularly since it seemed that all the women I met had been sterilized. That, too, interested me—this was true of both sexes on the civilized worlds* where all breeding was done in bio breeding centers, but the actuality seemed particularly peculiar here. So when I saw the pregnant girl, I was drawn irresistibly to her.

 
I had taken to frequenting a small store near the docks which specialized in entertainment electronics and which seemed to have some sort of a remarkable underground connection stretching off-world at some point that got a lot of the latest performances from the civilized worlds. Here was a piece of home, a place where you might run into other former prisoners, now exiles like myself, there also to get a little taste and memory of what was lost. . She was there one day, looking over the latest selections. A tiny young woman—it was impossible to think of her other than as a girl. From her looks, she could hardly have been out of her mid-teens. She had extremely long reddish-brown hair, perhaps a meter or more in
length, that
was held loosely with a brightly sparkling headband.

 
Actually, I wouldn't have known she was pregnant except for Otah, the owner of the place. I happened to be talking gadgets with him, as usual, when I spotted her.
"Hmmm. Cute.
Never saw
her
around here before."

 
"You stay away from that one," Otah warned gravely. "She's with child."

 
I frowned. "First time I've heard
that
here. I was beginning to wonder how any of the natives came about. But what's the taboo?"

 
"Pregnant. Don't you know? It's not a
condition,
it's a Class II occupation."

 
Well, there it was at last. "It's a
job?
She makes a living having babies?"

 
He nodded. "Hell of a tiling, ain't it? There's a whole colony of them down off Akeba. There's some that love it, but most of 'em would kill to switch
bodies
outta there.
Once
you're that, you're
that.
Best to keep 'em on a business basis only.
".

 
I had to chuckle. "What do they do? Steal your soul?"

 
He looked stricken. "Don't say that. Some of 'em's desperate enough to do most anything."

 
I couldn't help but chuckle at his caution and wonder just what could be so horrible. I
did
sort of wonder about the whole idea, though. Cloning was certainly within the allowable technology, if they wanted to spend the massive setup costs. Instead they seemed to have opted to take a percentage of young women, probably selected for genetic characteristics, and paid them to have kids. It seemed to me that, except for the birth itself, the major problem would be boredom—or perhaps being harried to death with a nursery full. ,