Charon (6 page)

 
I'm not me!
my
mind screamed at me.
I'm one of them—
one
of the surrogates!

 
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.

 
My shock gave way after a while to anger—anger and frustration. I was a copy, an imitation of somebody else entirely, somebody still alive and kicking and possibly monitoring my every move, my every thought. I hated that other then, hated him with a pathological force beyond reason. He would sit there comfortable and safe, 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 anyway at the completion of the mission just for insurance's sake.

 
My training came into automatic play at that point, overriding the shock and anger. I regained control and considered everything that I knew.

 
Monitor? Sure, more than ever. I recalled Krega saying that there was some sort of organic linkup. Are you enjoying this, you son of a bitch? Are you getting pleasure from vicariously experiencing my reaction?

 
My training clicked in again. It didn't matter, I told myself. First of all, I knew just what he must be thinking— and that was an advantage.
He
of all people would know that I would be a damned tough son of a bitch to kill.

 
It was a shock to discover that you.are not who you thought you were but some artificial creation. It was a shock, too, to realize that the old life, the life you remembered even if you personally "didn't experience it, was gone forever. No more civilized worlds, no more casinos or beautiful women or—
And
yet as I sat there, I adjusted. That was what they picked men like me for from the start—our ability to adjust and adapt to almost anything.

 
It was not my body, but I was still me. Memory and thought and personality were the individual, not his body. This was no different than a biological disguise, I told myself, of a particularly sophisticated sort As to who 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 in 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 me, the created me, I thought He, that nonentity playboy that presently did not exist, was the artificial personality. Me—the real me—was bottled up and stored in their psychosurgical computers and only allowed to come out when needed—and for good reason. Unlocked, I was as much a danger to the power structure as to whomever 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 and I wouldn't be killed if I could help it. That other me, sitting there in the console— somehow I no longer hated him very much, no longer felt anything at all for him. When this was aH over he'd be wiped once more—perhaps get 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

 
Me, on the other hand ... I would still be here, still live on, the
real
me. I would become 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.
/ would.
But my vulnerability would last only until I mastered my new situation and accustomed myself to my new and permanent home. I felt that with a deep sense of certainty, for I knew their methods and how they thought I'd have to do their dirty work for them, and they knew it—but only until I could get around it. They could be beaten, even on their own turf. That was why they had people like me in the first place. To uncover those who had expertly covered over then- whole lives and activities, who had managed to totally vanish from their best monitors.
To uncover them and get them.

 
But there'd be no new expert agent sent to get me if
I
beat them. They'd just be putting somebody else in the same position.

 
I realized then, as they had undoubtedly figured, that I had no choice but to carry out the mission. Only so long as I was doing what they wanted would I be safe from them while still in that vulnerable position. After—well, we'd see.

 
The thrill of the challenge took over, as it always did. There was a puzzle to be solved, were objectives to be accomplished. I liked to win. Doing so 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 either way, since I would be trapped on a Warden world from now on anyway. If the aliens won the coming confrontation, the Wardens would survive as allies. If they lost— well, it wouldn't make a damned bit of difference, only maintain the status quo. That meant the alien problem was purely an intellectual challenge and that made the situation perfect.

 
The other assignment created a similar situation. Seek out the Lord of that particular Diamond world and kill him if I could. In a sense this would be more difficult, for I'd be operating on totally unfamiliar ground and would therefore require time and possibly allies.
Another challenge.
And if I got him, it could only increase my own power and position over the long term. If he got me instead, of course, that would solve everybody's problem, but the thought of losing is abhorrent to me. That set the contest in the best terms, from my point of view. Trackdown and assassination was the ultimate game—either you won or you died and never had to live with the thought that you lost.

 
It suddenly occurred to me that the only real difference that probably existed between me and a Lord of the Diamond was that I was working for the law and
he—or she
— against it. But no, that wasn't right, eigher. On his world
he
was the law and I would be working against it Fine. Dead heat on moral grounds.

 
The only thing wrong at this point, I reflected, was that they were starting me at a tremendous disadvantage and I disliked having more handicaps than absolutely necessary. The normal procedure was to program all pertinent information into my brain before setting me off on a mission, but they hadn't done it this time. Probably, I thought, because they had me once on the table for four seperate missions, and the transfer process to a new body was hard enough without trying to add anything afterwards. Still, the outcome put me in a deep pit I thought sourly that somebody should have thought about that.

 
Somebody did, but it was a while before I discovered how. About an hour after I had awakened a little bell clanged near the food port and I walked over to it
Almost
instantly a hot tray appeared, along with a thin plastic fork and knife I recognized as the dissolving type. They'd melt into a sticky puddle in an hour or less,
then
dry up into a powder shortly after that Standard for prisoners.

 
The food was lousy, but I hadn't expected better. The vitamin-enriched fruit drink with it though, was pretty good. I made the most of the drink, keeping the thin, dear container which was
not
the dissolving type in case I wanted water later. The rest I put back in the
port,
and it vaporized neatly.
All nice and sealed.
You couldn't even draw more than a thimbleful of water at a time from the tap.

 
About the only thing they couldn't control was bodily
functions,
and a half hour or so after eating my first meal as a new man, say, I just had to go. On the far wall was a panel market
Toilet
and a small pull ring. Simple, standard stuff, the same sort of thing you might get in a cheap cabin on a passenger liner. I pulled the ring, the thing came down—and damned if there wasn't a paper-thin probe in the recess behind it

 
So I sat down on the John, leaned back against the panel, and got a brief and relief at the same time.

 
The
thing worked by skin contact—don't
ask me how. I'm not one of the tech brains. The system was not as good as a programming, but it allowed them to talk to me, even send me pictures that only I could see and hear.

 
"By now I hope you're over the shock of discovering who and what you are." Krega's voice came to me, seemingly forming in my brain. It was a shock to realize that not even my jailers could hear or see a thing

 
"We have to brief you this way simply because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Oh, don't worry about it—it's permanent. But we prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock. Besides, we haven't the tune to allow you to 'set in' completely, as it were. So this will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel that you have an exceptionally difficult assignment."

 
I felt the excitement rising within me. The challenge, the challenge . . .

 
"Your objective world is Charon, nearest to the sun of the Diamond colonies," the Commander's voice continued. "If there is a single place in the universe that will drive sane people mad and insane people to ecstasy, it is Charon. There is no way to adequately explain the effects of being there. You will have to find that out for yourself, and you will receive a thorough orientation briefing from Charon itself after you land.

 
"The imprint ability of this device is limited," he continued, "but we can send you one basic thing that may or may not be of use to you on Charon. It is a physical-political map of the entire planet, as complete and up-to-date as we could make it."

 
That puzzled me. Why would such a map
not
be of use? What kind of place was this, anyway? Before I could mull that over further and curse my inability to ask Krega questions, I felt a sharp pain in my back, men a short wave of dizziness and nausea. But when the discomfort cleared, I found the complete map was clearly and indelibly etched in my mind.

 
Following this
came
a stream of facts about the place not likely to be too detailed in any indoctrination lecture.

 
The planet was roughly 42,000 kilometers at the equator— or from pole back to pole, allowing for topographic differ-ences. Like all four Diamond worlds, Charon was basically a ball—highly unusual as planets go, even though everybody, including me, thinks of all major planets as round.

 
The gravity was roughly .88
norm
, so I'd feel a bit lighter and be able to jump further. That would take a slight adjustment in timing, and I made a note to work on that first and foremost Charon was a tad richer in oxygen, not really enough to matter, but it was overloaded with water vapor, which probably accounted for that extra oxygen in the first place.

 
The planet had a reasonable axial tilt, which normally would have meant strong seasonal changes, but 158,551,000 kilometers out from an F-type star it was basically a choice of hot, hotter, still hotter, and hotter than hell. There were no polar caps—the circulation of warm ocean water prevented it—but there
was
sometimes ice in the dead of winter in the arctic or antarctic circle regions, so even on a tremendously tropical world you
could
freeze, but as both polar regions were entirely water, it wasn't likely you'd ever get there.

 
Equatorial temperatures were almost at the limit of human endurance: temperatures of sixty degrees centigrade or more had been measured there, along with near-lethal radiation levels for brief periods near the time of the sun's direct rays. There was sufficient land in the more temperate zones for the mere eleven million or so people who inhabited the place. Not that the temperate zones were all
that
temperate—in the latitudes with the largest populations temperatures still reached above fifty degrees centigrade at midsummer and rarely fell below twenty-five degrees
in
the dead of winter—but they were better than that equator. The three major continental land masses, however, were spaced above, on, and just below the equator, thus keeping everybody in the hothouse. A day was about twenty-nine standard hours, not enough of a difference from that to which I was accustomed to be a real
factor,
and a year was a short 282 Charon days. _

 
Three continents—one not very useful that was mountainous and had large stretches of desert blocked from rain by the landforms; the other two basically tropical rain forests where the rain damn near never stopped. Not a cheery place at all, I reflected, remembering that old Warden had named this his vision of helL
Not
far off the mark.