Charon (3 page)

 
The Warden Diamond.

 
Even in a society like the Confederacy, there were the superior misfits. For all of humanity's perfections in environment, genetics, and culture, there was always the byproduct of such manipulation—the perfect criminal. They were few, but they existed, and because they could operate even in such societies as the civilized worlds, undetected in many cases for years, they were in fact the best of the best—those with that great spark the Confederacy nurtured and cherished. The petty ones could be "reeducated" or mindwiped and given a new personality. But these master criminals, these geniuses of crime and villainy, were far too valuable to be thus squandered. And yet no civilized prisons could hold them so the frontier would become their unrestricted playground.

 
Catching them was not the real problem, although some managed to do great damage before they were apprehended. All the Confederacy did was breed a new kind of super cop, a master detective type perfectly matched to the quarry. There were few of them, too—the Confederacy feared them almost as much as the criminals they caught—but they did their jobs well. They and their personally tailored and custom-matched self-aware analytical computers found the politically corrupt, the master crook, the psychopath, the most dangerous men and women ever produced in human history. But where could these people
be
put?

 
The Warden Diamond provided the final answer.

 
Halden Warden, a legendary space scout even in his own time, discovered the system nearly two hundred years before the robot was discovered in Military Systems Command. Warden disliked almost everything about the Confederacy, most of all other human beings, but only such an antisocial personality could stand the loneliness, the physical and mental hardships that came with deep-space scouting.

 
Warden, however, was worse than most. He spent as little time as possible in "civilization," often just long enough to refuel and reprovision. He flew farther, longer, and more often than any other scout before or since, and his discoveries set all-time records for their sheer volume alone. Unfortunately for
bis
bosses, Warden felt that discovery was his
only
purpose. He left just about everything else, including preliminary surveys and reports, to those who would use his beamed coordinates to follow him.
Not that he didn't do the work
—he just didn't send the information back to the Confederacy until he felt like it, often years later.

 
Thus when the signal "4AW" came in, there was enormous excitement and anticipation—four human-habitable planets in one systeml Such a phenomenon was simply unheard of, beyond all statistical probabilities, particularly considering how rare it was to find even one. They waited anxiously to hear the names the laconic scout would give the new worlds and his preliminary descriptions of them.

 
Then the report came, confirming their worst fears. He followed form, though, closest in to farthest out from the newly discovered sun.

 
"Charon,"
came
the first report. "Looks like hell.

 
"Lilith," he continued. "Anything that pretty's got to have a snake in it.

 
"Cerberus," he named the third. "Looks like a real dog."

 
And, finally, "Medusa.
Anybody who lives here would have to have rocks in his head."

 
The coordinates followed, along with a code confirming that Warden had done remote but no direct exploration— mat is, he hadn't landed—and a final code, "ZZ," which filled them with some fear. It meant that there was something very odd about the place, so approach with extreme caution.

 
They cursed Crazy Warden even as they assembled the maximum-caution expedition. A full-scale science team, with two hundred of the best, most experienced Exploiter Team members aboard, backed up by four heavy cruisers armed to the teeth. They knew that Warden's reports were almost always right, but you never found out how until it was almost too late.

 
The huge F-type star had a massive solar system that included eleven gas giants, eight of them ringed spectacularly, as well as large numbers of comets, asteroids, and some large solid planets of no use. But the system had four worlds—four jewels—that stood out from all the rest, four worlds with abundant oxygen, nitrogen, and water.

 
And when they looked first at those four worlds, they were almost exactly at right angles to one another in their orbits.

 
The Warden Diamond.

 
Of
course, as the planets were in far different orbits this diamond formation was quite rare. In fact it has not been precisely duplicated since man first saw it

 
Still, there was an uneasy feeling that somehow the Warden Diamond was not a natural thing. The Exploiter Team was suspicious, as Warden himself had been, and doubly cautious.

 
Charon, the world closest to the sun, was a hot and steamy world. It rained a lot of the time there, and the dominant life seemed to be reptilian, almost dinosaurlike. Seas covered much of the hothouse world, but although the atmosphere was hardly pleasant, man could live on it unaided.

 
The second world, Lilith, was almost textbook perfect.
Slightly smaller than Charon, it was roughly seventy percent water but far more temperate and gentler in the landscape. Mountains were low, and there were broad plains and swamps. Its axial tilt was so slight there were few seasons anywhere on the planet, and while it was warm to hot, it was comfortably warm, almost resort-type warm. It was a blue-green world, rich in plant life that was different but not
too
different from what man knew elsewhere, and its creatures were insectlike, from almost too small to see up to behemoths that still seemed harmless, perhaps even useful. It was the kind of world that terraformers aimed for and almost never achieved—and not a snake in sight

 
Cerberus was harsher, but not much. Although it had great seasonal variations, none were all that unmanageable, and in the large tropical zones there was plenty of room for settlement—or there might have been if there had been some land. The trouble was, the entire world was covered

 
by
a great, deep ocean. Still, there was a strange sort of plant life there, which rose up from the ocean floor to break the surface and almost reach for the sky.
Giant plant colonies, so huge, strong, and clumped together that they formed large, almost landlike masses.
The seas held promise, though, of huge and vicious predators. It would not be an easy world to live on, and they could see why Warden called it a dog, particularly when compared with Lilith.

 
Finally, farthest out, there was Medusa, a hard, cold, rocky world with frozen seas, blinding snow, and mountains broken with the only evidence of vulcanism on the four worlds. There were some forests, but mostly tundra and grasslands. It was an ugly place.

 
But back on old Earth, man had lived and built in lands at least as bad as Medusa. In the temperate zones people, with a lot of hard work and a lot of time, could even build a civilization there. Still, to want to go to a place like that and make it your home, well—you had to have rocks in your head.

 
Four worlds, from steaming hell to frozen tundra.
Four worlds that still had temperature extremes that could be borne and air and water that could be used.
It was incredible.
Fantastic.
And it was for real.

 
Not being crazy, the Exploiter Team chose Lilith as its main base, settling in on a beautiful island in a tropical lagoon. After a week or so of preliminary setup, smaller teams were sent out to the other three from Lilith to set up provisional base camps.

 
Once down, the Exploiter Teams were placed in strict quarantine from the military and all commerce with the Confederacy. It would take at least a year with the team serving as the guinea pigs, poking and probing and testing, before others would set foot on any of the worlds. They had shuttlecraft capable of traveling between the four planets, if need be, and ground and air transportation for their own work, but nothing interstellar. The risk was too great; man had been burned too many times to take any chances.

 
It took Lilith's snake about six months to size up the newcomers.

 
Scientists eventually gave it a long, incomprehensible name, but everybody referred to it as the Warden organism—or, often, as the Warden beast It was a tiny little thing, not really life as we knew it, and so it hadn't been recognized as such until far too late. And yet it was pervasive. It was attached to almost every solid and liquid molecule on Lilith, organic and inorganic, almost as a component of the molecular structure itself. It was not sentient— nothing that small and that elementary could be—but it was omnipresent and it knew what it wanted. It didn't like molecules that didn't have it inside, and it did a very nice job of dissolving almost everything alien to Lilith, leaving all the equipment, even the clothes on the scientists' backs, as so much fine powder. Lilith's little beast could not cope with any synthetic compounds, and almost everything the Exploiter Teams used or wore was in fact synthetic. The scientists themselves, and some of their plants, were non-synthetic carbon-based organic stuff, and the Warden organism could cope with that. It quickly invaded every cell and set up housekeeping, modifying each cell to suit itself in a nicely symbiotic relationship. This was scant comfort to sixty-two stunned, stark-naked scientists that they never again had to worry about colds and that even minor wounds would heal themselves.

 
Thanks to the expeditionary bases on the other three worlds, the Warden organism, it was theorized, had been carried there by the first to settle. Of course, the three other planets were quite different from Lilith—different gravities, different levels of radiation, different atmospheric balances. The Warden organism could not adapt those whole worlds to its Lilith standard, but the submi-croscopic creature had a hell of a survival instinct. On Medusa, for example, it adapted the host organism—the people, and, quickly, the plants and animals—so as to ensure their, and its, survival. On Cerberus and Charon it struck a balance in the hosts that was to its liking, but which produced by-products of physical change not relevant to it but rather resulting from that balance it found most comfortable. This produced strange by-products in the humans so infected.

 
A cure was sought, but to no avail. The Warden organism, it seemed, so changed the host's body chemistry that the host could no longer live
without
the Wardens there— but the Wardens required more, something else,
something
not dear.
When
you removed a Warden-infected person from the Diamond, the organisms died—and so did its unfortunate host

 
The mutation was so complete that those on one Warden
world
could
move from world to world, but could not move outside the system—ever. Humans
could
live, work, and build in the Warden Diamond, but once there, they could never leave.

 
It became the perfect prison for those master criminals.

 
So first bad
come
the scientists, then the criminal elite. Over two hundred years a large indigenous human population had arisen on the four worlds as well—by far the majority. But the criminal element was the elite and the rulers. They hated the Confederacy for what it had done to them, and thanks to the Wardens within them, no longer felt human but something quite apart, alien, having no loyalty or kinship to the civilized worlds. Quickly they established control over then* worlds, and quickly, too, they took advantage of interstellar communications to reestablish contact with their far-flung criminal empires and even with the Confederacy itself. They were quick to realize that the Warden Diamond not only kept them
in,
it also kept the Confederacy
out.
They controlled the fate of all sent to the Warden Diamond, and even the best Confederacy agent not only was at their mercy but was also, like them, changed and trapped there forever.

 
It usually took ^very little time for such agents to realize on which side their bread was buttered.

 
Their old cronies Outside in the rest of the Confederacy were quick to note that, except for Lilith, one could steal the
Mono Lisa
and by remote courier could leave it in the Diamond in plain sight—and no one could touch it, let alone recover it But since the
Mono Lisa
was made of natural pigment and canvas, and was inanimate, it could not "die" should the thief ask for its removal, retrieving it beyond the range of Warden life. The Warden Diamond was the perfect repository, for the cops couldn't even confiscate the evidence.

 
It became the safe-deposit box for the rulers of the Confederacy, because of its total inaccessibility. Much of the wealth and many of the secrets of the great interstellar empire went through the Warden Diamond, which gained more and more by proving itself reliable and secretive.

 
To the leaders of each of the worlds—the best of the best, the criminal elite, the top crooks evolution could produce— accrued tremendous power and wealth that reached to the far limits of the Confederacy and far exceeded their powers back in the old days. These four leaders of the four Warden worlds were probably the most powerful human beings alive.