The Morphodite

by M. A. Foster

  The visitor, meeting a very sleepy and out-of-sorts Glist, was Arunda Palude, the recorder. As soon as Glist opened the door and admitted her, she slipped in, motioning him to silence.

  “Secured.”

  Glist nodded assent, still half asleep.

  “I’ll be brief. I have had short-form communication with the inside man. A major assault in the works; agent, a human supposedly deep-trained in some kind of assassination science, target unknown, location to be Marula. Reference Acmeists in Clisp. Time unknown, to be associated with initiation of underground effort. I have recognition coordinates,* but although they are in stage-five form, there’s a tag line attached that says they are changeable or tentative.”

  * A technique of verbal description of a person utilizing that section of the brain devoted to recognition of facial patterns. Used when photographs or drawings would be impractcal or dangerous, as for espionage operations. Use widespread off Oerlikon, unknown there by natives.

  Glist now began to wake up. “That’s a risk, sending all that.”

  “He was quite concerned. Action Flash, Priority Grave—survival of mission at stake. So he said. I came immediately.”

  “You have the recognition coordinates?”

  “Yes. Do you want them?”

  “No. Take them to Sheptun, now, tell him to go to Marula and stop this person by any means available, and capture alive for shipment. He can take a few with him, if he wants. We don’t want this thing to occur.”

  “No, we do not. But do you have an idea of what you are sending and what he will have to face?”

  “I would send Kham, but I can’t get to him, and even if I could, I don’t know he could get there in time—we don’t know when it is. Besides… we can’t sent this kind of thing to our people in Marula until Sheptun gets there. That’s one place outside Clisp they keep a close eye on. Marula, they say, a necessary evil, but evil none the less.”

  “It’s the only real city they have…”

  “Yes and they distrust it mightily. No. We don’t dare try to communicate direct. I prohibit it. Send Sheptun and tell him to recruit, and do it quietly. We don’t want to set this off ourselves.”

  “As you say… right now?”

  “Yes. Now. And tomorrow… I’ll come to your place, and we’ll translate those RCs into a picture and I’ll see that it gets to Chugun’s people.”

  “Won’t that contradict our sending Sheptun? I mean, won’t that create a confusion?”

  “Possible. But I trust the Insider to set priorities accurately. He’s no wolf-cryer, so much I know. I want everything working on this, so it can be stopped. Chugun will grind Marula to a powder, and he may flush something for Sheptun.”

  “I know the structure is in place, but you know we’ve never shipped a Lisak off-planet before. If Sheptun captures this thing, whoever it is, trying to get it off-planet may be more difficult than the plan has envisioned. There’s a risk of exposure there. I feel an uneasiness about that.”

  “Risk, yes. But if the insider calls for action, then it must be something extraordinary. We need to have that person examined on Heliarcos, where we have proper facilities for testing.”

  “If he gets him, what will we do with him? The assassin?”

  “Find out how he was trained and who trained him. Then dispose of him. Then dismantle the apparatus here. That’s what I’ll recommend, and at the moment I expect no difficulty with Control. The prime directive is to protect the mission here no matter what” At the last words, Glist’s voice shifted tone, to emphasize the words. No matter what. That was the key. Glist nodded, as if agreeing with himself, and he said, “Now go on; do it And we’ll meet tomorrow morning for the rest”

  Aranda adjusted the hood of her night cloak and departed without further word. Glist closed the door behind her and returned to his bed. But he did not sleep for a long time, and he felt an odd emotion he could not recall ever feeling before, something to which he could not put a proper name. He considered several conditions before it dawned on him that the emotion was fear.

  Elegro Avaria met Luto Pternam outside the chamber in which Rael had been housed. He said, excitedly, “I saw him leave!”

  Pternam felt weary, bone-tired. He said, “Yes. It’s done now. And now we wait. I’ll arrange to have a small talk with Monclova about impending activity among the underground factions in Marula.”

  “You can’t”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s already there. Went down there to have that big public celebration marking the Liberation of Sertse Solntsa.”

  “What bad luck! Well, who’s left behind?”

  “He always leaves Odisio Chang to mind the store when he’s out motivating the people, as he calls it.”

  “Chang’s a shadow, that’s all. He doesn’t cast his own. Worthless for our purposes. We have to register it that we forewarned them. Chang is so busy covering himself that if he acted at all, he’d say it came from himself… look into this, will you? We have to find somebody now who will act for us.”

  “You are not worried that Rael will get Monclova?”

  “Not at all. According to Rael, Monclova is the least one he’d be interested in. No—he says he’s looking for someone ordinary, obscure, someone nobody knows, a slogger… No, I have no fears for Monclova.”

  “Very well. I will set to it in the morning. I’m sure we can find someone left behind.”

  “Good. And take these, will you… send them over to R&D Delusion Section and let them break a few computers on it.” Pternam handed Avaria the sheaf of papers he had taken from Rael’s quarters. “Also have housekeeping put some trusties in there and clean the place out. I want every scrap of paper; otherwise, strip it down to the bare walls and seal it off.”

  “Not going to try again?”

  “No. It’s just a feeling, but I think we came quite close enough this time. If this doesn’t work… well, we’ll try something else.”

  “I understand. And what about the guards?”

  “They should be retrained, of course.”

  “All of them?”

  “I can’t think of any reason to make an exception. Them, the same way as the ones who set Rael up in that method of taking command of his own hormone system.”

  “As you say. That’s a lot of people to put through the process, though.”

  “But there’s nothing to connect him here, and that’s the way we want it.”

  Avaria sighed deeply, shaking his head. “I’ll see to it, and all the records and logs as well. Nice and clean.”

  “Good. See me tomorrow… about who we can place a hint to so they’ll remember.”

  “I’ll do it. Want a feedback from R&D, on those notes?”

  “Only if they make any sense other than delusional.” Pternam laughed at this. “Which I doubt greatly.”

  And with that last remark, they parted company, Avaria to his errands, and Pternam to bed. Before Avaria saw to the room and the guards, however, he made a short side trip to the Research section, in particular the computational facility, where he left the package of notes off, with a casual instruction to the night operator to “make some sense of it if you can.” Avaria told the operator that the papers were some things done up by one of the subjects undergoing reorientation, and they wanted to know if any of the material was valid, by chance. Then he set about initiating another sequence of events.

  Luto Pternam greeted the new day’s daylight considerably sooner than he had hoped or expected, by being awakened by the earnest, excitable voice of Avaria at the bedside communicator. Its buzzing was soft, but insistent, and Pternam answered it with reluctance.

  “Pternam.”

  “Avaria. I have a report to make.”

  “Make it, then.”

  “In person.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “No. At least, so much I think. I urge haste.”

  “Come up, then—I’ll be ready.” And he closed the unit down with both disgust and fore
boding. He hated being bothered after the events of the night before, but in the same manner, he knew that Avaria would probably not assay to bother him with senseless trivia. In a peculiar state of emotion, he found himself wishing that it was some trivial problem.

  By the time Pternam had dressed, Avaria had appeared, with a disturbed look to him and an air of someone who was also awakened too early. And the report was by no means trivial.

  Avaria came into Pternam’s private chambers and did not wait nor did he pass conversational pleasantries before beginning; “The Computational Facility advised me early on this morning that the material in the Rael folder remains incomprehensible to them but that the machine considers it valid, coherent data which can be assembled into a system. They wish to know if you want it translated.”

  “Translated?”

  “It is built of concepts which are alien to our present state of reference, and there is a program of re-education involved. So they are advised by the machine. It will take translation to make it comprehensible to us. Such a process is possible, but it will disrupt the operating schedule.”

  Pternam reflected and said, “No. So inform them. Return the material to me immediately, and purge the computer of all associations. We will destroy this.”

  Avaria, pausing for Pternam to permit him to use the room communicator, which he did with a slight inclination of the head, went to the unit and spoke rapidly into it. Then he turned back to Pternam and said slowly, “Done. Coming by messenger. Do you…?” The question was unthinkable and unaskable. And as he had started to ask it, Avaria had realized that it was also unanswerable.

  Pternam said, “Go on. No offense.”

  “…They don’t know what it is. It went directly to the delusion section, and was read out by the machine. So we can snuff that out easily enough. But about Rael…”

  “This means, Avaria, that Rael is in possession of valid knowledge of how to do the thing we thought impossible—a delusion.”

  “That is my conclusion. And we have already released him, holding now an active weapon, not an imaginary one. I comprehend our error, but I don’t understand how it could have been otherwise. Who would have thought such a thing: to attack the smallest and change the nature of a whole world.”

  Pternam said, “You are extraordinarily calm for such a disaster.”

  “I assume you know something I do not, that you have a program in reserve you did not advise me of. Such are the ways of one’s superiors; otherwise they would not be superiors. Anything else is unthinkable.”

  Pternam’s mind was racing at top speed, considering possibilities, but he did not miss the weight of the sarcasm Avaria had laid upon him, and of course the veiled threat behind it. He understood. This plan had entangled itself in its own nets of subtlety. And now they had a real problem on their hands. Onrushing, the future unthinkable was rushing to meet them, in the mind and hands of Rael the changeling, Rael the Morphodite who could vanish into another identity. Avaria was saying that Pternam was not fit for the position. But of course he had alternatives. They were not subtle, and they lacked imagination, but there was a chance they would work.

  He said, “We aren’t completely out of control yet; consider—we know Rael will do it in Marula, and we know he’ll reappear as Azart afterwards. We may also deduce that it will be soon, hence he’ll have to get there.”

  Avaria stroked his plump chin and said, “We can’t very well count on the revolutionaries anymore—besides, what could we tell them? That our lie has become true? No. And as for Rael, you and I know him well enough, so I do not take him for a fool. Azart he may become, unless he lied, but I would not wait for him to present himself or herself to them.”

  Pternam said, “We’ll notify Chugun that a prisoner from Reprocessing has escaped, believed headed for Marula to settle a grudge, highly dangerous, no remand.”

  “Shoot on sight.”

  “Something like that. But that’s not all. We’ve some retrainees here who would carry out a hazardous assignment…”

  Avaria looked at Pternam hard. He said, “You haven’t got anybody that good, to go one-on-one against Rael. I supervised that phase of his training; in that at least, he’s highly dangerous.”

  “I don’t expect them to win; just slow him down, enough for Chugun’s goons to catch up with him. He’s like a queen in chess, but even a queen may have to pause to destroy pawns placed in the way.”

  “Do you have any feel for how long we have to stop him?”

  “No. But I do feel that we have some time, if we act now.”

  “Very well. I will see to it. I know the subjects you mean. We’ll ready them, prime them and send them out”

  “Use all of those in readiness state.”

  “All? Just so. And Chugun?”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Fair enough. But there’s something about this sequence of events I find makes me uneasy.”

  “Go on.”

  “Rael left the papers behind for you. And he said he wouldn’t tell us anything that would make any difference. So by that, he’s telling us he doesn’t care if we know. That we can’t stop him.”

  “You are filled with happy prospects today.”

  “Yes. Hindsight is wonderful; but there are things you can’t know, it seems, until you reach for them in reality.”

  “And everything else he told us in the end?”

  “That, too. Well, to work.” And Avaria turned and left Pternam’s private quarters.

  Pternam, now alone, waited a bit before calling Chugun. For a time, he thought bleak and private thoughts, his mind still racing. And in rehearsing exactly what he was going to tell Chugun, he quite forgot one thing Rael had told him. It hadn’t seemed important at the time, and was even less so now. Something about an unseen party maintaining the Lisak world. It hovered, this thought, just out of sight Something important, but not right now.

  And when he had finished his call to the offices of Femisticleo Chugun, a nagging thought kept ticking away at the corner of his mind that there was something else he should have said, but he couldn’t quite place exactly what it was. No matter. The forces were now in motion, for better or worse.

  — 5 —

  Tiresio

  Seconing.

  Rael read the signboard and paused a moment to allow some sense of spatial orientation to assert itself. He had come in the night, using these first few hours of freedom to put distance between himself and Pternam. But on foot there was not much he could do except disappear, which he could do well enough. Seconing. This was a distant suburb to the south of Symbarupol, a small and sleepy townlet concentrating on small manufactures, small crafts shops. Here, the buildings were more functional, and smaller, and the streets narrower. They favored plain wooden buildings here with large windows of many small panes, which now in the darkness showed only the dim glow of watchlamps. The streets were empty, shiny-damp with dew, colored with a bluish tint from the shops and streetlamps; Seconing tumbled down the last slope to the plains of Crule in pleasant disorder, with the hills close behind to the east. Far off out on the plains, he could hear in the quiet the passing of a beamliner running on its elevated I-beam, a rhythmic, steady, muffled sound.

  The beamliner passed to the south. An express, it did not approach or stop at places like Seconing. Now he listened again, and heard, farther off, eastwards, deep in the hills, the night-cries of bosels, indigenous creatures of unpredictable habit The calls had the odd quality of sounding profoundly artificial to the human ear, as if made electronically. There was a monotonous three-syllable call, starting on one note, then one higher, sliding to the original tone, repeated rhythmically several times. Another was a tinkling, tumbling sequence of no apparent order, and still another was a long wail, suggestive of profound loneliness. No one knew if that was what it really expressed; Bosels were alien, wild, and erratic enough to be regarded as demons by more conservative country folk. At night they prowled and called back and forth, sometimes ma
king astonishing collations of sound, which the Lisaks wisely shut their windows to.

  Rael quickened his pace through the dark streets, among the shops, avoiding the residential hillocks and their attendant racks of velocipedes, all set neatly in rows. Bosels were not unknown in towns like this in the night, so his recent education informed him, and against them his equations seemed to have no power. They were approximately man-sized, and could be dangerous; Rael felt no fear, but he did not wish to meet one. That was not within the desirable sequence of events, and would attract some onlooker. Not now.

  There were short ramps connecting the levels of the curving streets, hardly more than alleyways, which Rael followed downwards, to the edge of the plains. At the bottom, he found his view to the west obscured by an untidy tangle of I-beams in sturdy metal posts: the local beamer switching yards, now mostly quiet, although here he could sense the suggestion of active life. He followed the lines farther south, not entering them, but staying in the street, until the local terminal building appeared; this a plain, workshoplike structure with a small windowed cupola at each end. Empty, dark as the rest, with a small lamp inside making only a weak glimmer. Closed for the night. Across the street there was a glimmer of light and movement, a small rest-place halfway under the overhang of one of the buildings fronting the yards and the station. A warehouse or storage depot. Rael detached himself from the shadows and walked slowly toward the rest, falling easily into the movement pattern of one who had nothing to do but wait. An easy walk, passing time, while inside he heard time running steadily, inexorably.

  Around him, there was quiet, and, muffled and distorted by the buildings of the town, he heard a last call of a bosel, somewhere up in the hills on the other side: a long, rising, reedy tone, leveling out and collapsing at the end into a descending series of short titters. Eerie music. It bothered him that he heard it so clearly, for he knew that the humans on Oerlikon ignored or avoided the native life forms as much as possible. Nerves, he thought. After all, this, now was really where he emerged into the stream of the world. Now. Rael stepped out of the shadows into the glow of the overhanging streetlights and went directly to the rest-house, down a short flight of stone stairs, smelling of damp woollen clothing and stale beer.