Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

by Jack L. Chalker

  “That’s true,” I admitted, “but the system’s designed against it. We’re all kept in artificial, stable environments where that sort of thing just won’t happen. Even so, I’m sure it has, maybe when somebody’s gotten into an accident or was in danger of drowning or something. Transformations may occur every day. But if so, those people are rescued, hustled off to psychs, and put right. Even memories are sponged from the minds of people involved directly or of the people who observed it. And, by the way, I think we ought to know who you are. I’m Tarin Bul.”

  “Angi Patma, Construction Guild,” she responded.

  We made introductions all around. I was particularly concerned with the usually outgoing Ching, who now seemed quiet and sullen, still in shock. I walked over to her. “Come on—we’re gonna be fine,” I soothed. She looked up at me. “I. know.”

  I frowned. “What’s wrong, hon? I was proud of you!” She was silent for a moment. Finally she said, “You killed four people, Tarin. Killed. And you’re not even a little sorry about it.”

  I sighed. “Listen, Ching—I had to do it. It was the only way. When someone is marching you off to your death, and happy to do it, he forfeits his own right to life. Those survivors—they’re still going to get those fifty-five or so who remained. None of them are going to be left alive, at least not without destroyed minds. That is a worse crime in my book. Remember, these people were picked for TMS for the same reason everybody else on Medusa is picked for his job. They like bullying, scaring, and even killing people.”

  “Don’t you?”

  That stopped me for a moment. The fact was, I really did love my job, of course. But there was a difference. At least, I hoped there was. “I’m not interested in bullying or scaring anybody, except for that kind of person. People who like to hurt other people is who I hunt and get. That’s not so bad,, is it?”

  She didn’t seem sure, and the more I thought about it, neither was I. From birth I had been raised to believe in the Confederacy, in its perfection and its ideals. But, in that context, what was my job, anyway? The same as TMS here? To track down those who posed a threat to the Confederacy’s system—or who abused or perverted it—and send them to psychs, or to the Warden Diamond, or, on rare occasions, to their deaths. True, most of the Confederacy was a far better system than Ypsir’s Medusa, but the people here did in fact believe in that system, including those in TMS. In their minds they were no different from me. Did that make us different—or the same? Medusa was nothing if not a perversion—a distorted mirror image—of the Confederacy’s system and dreams. That must have been why I felt so uncomfortable with it.

  I rose to my feet. “Let’s get walking. They’ll have foot patrols through here anytime now, and we’ve already stayed too long. Let’s make all the time at night we can. We can talk on the way.”

  They did send a few patrols and copters after us, and we saw or heard them from time to time, but they made no more than a minimum effort, which simply wasn’t good enough. To their minds, being out in the wild was tantamount to being dead anyway, and nobody was really worth the kind of effort that would have been needed to track us down. Again it was Medusa’s own system that allowed us our freedom, although what sort of freedom remained to be seen.

  The biology texts hadn’t revealed the half of Medusa’s natural history, though. Not only were there hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different plants large and small, but the forests literally teemed with animal life. All of it was strange-looking on the surface, but at the same time very much like many other planets. Perhaps the theory that ecosystems developed under nearly identical conditions came out much the same way was true. Here, as elsewhere, trees were clearly trees and insects clearly bugs—and they served the same functions.

  The first real concern wasn’t eluding a ho-hum pursuit, but finding food. Coming into spring in the “tropical” regions meant that there were a number of berries and fruits around, but little looked ripe and all was unknown to me.

  “How do we know what’s safe and what’s not?” Angi complained, hungry like the rest of us.

  “I think it’s simple,” I told them all. “At least, it should be. If there’s anything really lethal around it should produce some kind of warning that our Wardens will trigger. That berry, there, for example, smells really foul, and I wouldn’t touch it. Even my initial indoctrination, though, said that we could eat almost anything, with the Wardens converting the substance into what we and they really need. I’d say, for now, we just pick something that at least seems practical to eat and eat it.”

  It took some time, though, and a lot of guts, before we decided to go through with a test. The leaves and unripe fruits tasted from bitter to lousy, but once we started eating we found it difficult to stop until we felt full. All of us suffered a bit from stomach aches and the runs that night but after a somewhat fitful sleep on the open ground we all awoke feeling much better. After that our Wardens adjusted even more to our new situation and provided the guidance we needed—much as I’d hoped. Some stuff that tasted lousy the first time tended to taste quite good after that, while other stuff just tasted worse and worse. With that neat sorting and classification system to go on, we had no more trouble, although I confess that Ching wasn’t the only one who dreamed of good meat and fresh fruit.

  Well, we wouldn’t starve, so the next thing was to adapt our lifestyle to this new environment. Clothing proved unnecessary, as always, and after what we’d been through modesty was no longer a factor. Shelter from the cold rains and occasional ice-pellet storms was provided by the forests and, if necessary, we could rig portable lean-tos from branches and the broad leaves of a prevalent bush. In point of fact I had the survival training and the means to make permanent dwellings, if necessary, but I had no intention of founding a village at this point. We had three months before the first snows, with the best weather yet to come, to find the Wild Ones. That had to be our first priority.

  Over several days I made a broad circle around Rochande and then headed toward the coast which that handy map in my head said was there. From that point, and using the sun for direction, I could determine our approximate location and chart where we were going.

  The first few weeks were education weeks. We learned what we could eat, where it was most likely to grow, and what caused problems. I gave a small seminar in survival skills—building lean-tos, that sort of thing—and we also learned the habits of many of the animals. The tree-dwelling tubros were all around, but if you didn’t bother them they wouldn’t bother you. The vettas stayed mostly in the clearings and on the plains, so we tended to avoid such places. We had not met a harrar as yet, and I, for one, had no intention of doing so if I could help it.

  Then there were the occasional thermal areas. The place wasn’t full of them, but they were far more numerous than I originally would have guessed. Geyser holes, bubbling mudpots, and fumeroles turned up in the damnedest places and, occasionally, we even came across a hot thermal pool. Once you got used to the sulfurous stink, these pools were very handy for bathing. We even tried some experiments in wrapping all sorts of food in leaf bags and boiling them.

  We also got to know one another better than I think any of us had ever known anyone before. I will say this for all three of them—they were inwardly tough. Though complaints were numerous they had by and large accepted their lot fatalistically and began to look upon this new life as some sort of great adventure. I wondered, though, if they would have fared so confidently or so well had I not been there to teach them a few tricks of the trade.

  There was no more purpose in concealment, and I explained to them just who and what I was. In a sense the explanation seemed to reassure them, and the fact that I was a professional agent somehow seemed to soften Ching’s initial revulsion at my killings. It became less of a radical change in me than a reversion to form, and she seemed better able to accept that.

  We lapsed into a total familiarity so easily I often wondered if the Wardens had anything to do with it. Mor
phy became “just Bura,” Ching was still Ching, and Angi’s last name I just about forgot. As for me, I accepted everybody calling me by Ching’s pet name for me—Tari—and we became just one big family.

  The fifty-five who remained behind continued to weigh heavily on me, though, and I decided to find out why they stayed and these didn’t.

  Bura, it seemed, was a native but had once been much higher in the Guild. Years earlier she had married into a family group that included another exile to the Diamond, a rough-and-tumble man built like an ox who had a horrible temper with those outside his own family group but was kind and gentle at home. Still, she admired his independent spirit, his disdain for TMS and the system, and, I suspect, she damn near worshiped him. One day he had one too many run-ins with TMS, of course, and he’d blown up and literally snapped a monitor in two. Most of the family, to save their own skins, were willing to testify against him as to his murderous instincts and to his inability to “assimilate” into Medusan society. Bura refused, for which she was transferred halfway around the world and demoted to a passenger-service shift supervisor with no hope of advancing any further. At that she’d gotten off lucky, but when the psych she was sent to by TMS for adjustment instead introduced her to the Opposition, she was more than ready and willing and quickly rose to cell leader—Sister 657, of course.

  Angi had a less understandable background. Born and raised on Medusa, and never to her knowledge having had any contact with Diamond transportees, she nonetheless, was always somebody who didn’t quite fit. As a kid she’d beaten the bus fares and done some minor shoplifting—for which she was never caught—and she’d qualified for training as a civil engineer. The subject fascinated her, but the restrictions, the lack of creativity, the sheer sameness imposed from above, had always gotten to her, so she’d never progressed very far. When you built just one way, and all of the tough problems had already been solved, it was a pretty dull profession. She’d been doing quality-control supervision for a massive repair of the bus system in a sector of Rochande—“real thrilling work,” she called it without enthusiasm. Again it was a routine psych exam that introduced her to the Opposition, and she joined simply because it was another something different to do. She had been the one who had pushed the armed monitor over the rail—“strictly on impulse,” she told us.

  None knew the other courageous woman, the one who had led us out of the city only to be denied freedom and life herself, but all of us agreed that, no matter where—or whether—she was at the moment, she was and would always be a member of our family.

  Family is exactly what we became in those early days of Medusa’s spring. On a world whose culture was based upon the group marriage, there was no real jealousy or bad feelings between any of the women, and certainly not from me. In fact, this period of isolation, just the four of us living much as man’s ancestors must have lived back on the ancient home world of man a million years ago, was in many respects the best time of my entire life. It was during this period that, I think, I turned my back once and for all on the Confederacy.

  We made our way in zigzag fashion from coast to interior thermal areas and back again, developing a sense of where the thermal regions were. We headed north because Bura’s long tenure on the trains had shown her that some Wild Ones definitely lived between Rochande and Gray Basin. She had caught glimpses of manlike shapes in the distance several times—in the direction of the coast. Occasionally we would find traces of habitation, signs of a temporary encampment, but there seemed no way at all to tell how warm or cold the trail.

  Ultimately we never found them—they found us. Exactly how long we were alone in our wandering tribal existence I don’t know, but summer was definitely upon us when, one day, stepping into a clearing, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by several new people.

  The group consisted of one man and six women, at least one of whom appeared quite pregnant. Like us, they were dark-skinned and hairless, a condition that looked quite natural and normal to us now. All wore skirts of some reddish or black hair and all bore homemade bows and spears. Obviously from their manner they’d been observing us for some time, but they said nothing and made no move toward us when they showed themselves. They just stood there, looking hard at our little group. We, of course, looked back.

  Finally I shrugged, put up my hands palms out. “We’re friends. We mean you no harm.”

  For a while they made no response, and gave no indication that they understood my words, and I grew nervous that there might be some sort of language gap. No telling what sort of culture people raised in this wild would develop. But, finally, one of the women asked, “What tribe do you come from? Where are your tribal marks?”

  “No tribe,” I responded, feeling relieved. “Or, say, rather, that we are our own tribe.”

  “Outcasts,” one of the -others hissed, in a tone that did not indicate approval.

  “Not from a tribe,” I said quickly. “We escaped from the cities.”

  They showed some surprise at that, the first real emotion Pd seen any of them display. I had never really dealt with a primitive group before, and I was winging it, hoping I wouldn’t put my foot in my mouth. Those weapons looked pretty grim. One of the women whispered to the one who appeared to be their leader, “The demons live in those places. It is a demon trick.”

  The leader shrugged off the comment. “What do you wish here?”

  “A tribe,” I responded, trying to get as much into the mind-set as I could. “A place to belong, to learn the ways of the world and the ways of a great tribe of people.”

  That seemed to be the right response, because the leader nodded sagely to herself. She seemed to think it over, then made her decision—which, I noted, was final no matter what the others thought. “You will come with us. We are the People of the Rock. We will take you to our camp, where the Elders will decide.”

  “That sounds good to us,” I told her, and, with that, they all turned and started back into the forest. I looked at the others, shrugged, and followed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Demons of the Mount

  They had not mentioned that they were several days from this camp of theirs, and that didn’t become apparent for some time. They allowed us to follow them, all right, but kept themselves apart, not talking to us any more than they had to and occasionally taking suspicious glances at us when they thought we weren’t looking. It was clear that, while a leader’s decision was absolute and to be obeyed, it didn’t mean you had to agree with it.

  They carried sacks of some kind of skin, in which were various supplies, bows, extra spear points, that sort of thing, but no food. That they foraged for, much as we had, although they had a dietary element that we’d lacked to this point. They hunted vettas and tubros, and did it expertly, considering the primitiveness of their equipment. They could stake out a place silently for an hour or more, seemingly not moving at all. But when a vetta, for example, came close they would rise around it in a circle, tossing spears and shooting arrows with precision and lightning speed, bringing the panicked animal down. Then they would disembowel it with a different, even nastier sort of spear. The vettas, too, were Warden creatures, and you had to kill them quickly or repairs would begin.

  Once they were sure the animal was dead they would skewer it on a couple of spears and carry it between two of them, the poles expertly balanced on their shoulders, until they came to a thermal pool. There, experts wielded stone axes in butchering the animal into various small parts which were then wrapped in leaves and cooked in the thermal pools. As one who had, at one time or another, eaten natural meat on frontier worlds, it wasn’t more than a curiosity to me, but to my three wives it was a sickening experience. Butchering an animal is not pretty, and none of the three had ever seen it done before or even thought about it. I had to work pretty hard to prevent them from showing their disgust.

  “You have to have real guts,” I told them, ‘like you did back in the escape. If they offer any to us, take it and eat
it. You don’t have to like it, and you can be disgusted by it, but we need them.”

  “I don’t know why we need anybody,” Ching protested. “We were doing pretty good, I think, and we were happy.”

  “Vettas are happy until they’re caught and killed,” I retorted. “We’re more than animals, Ching. We’re human beings—and human beings have to grow and learn. That’s why we need them.”

  We were offered some of the kill, after the rest had taken their pick of the best cuts, and I complimented them on their great skill as hunters—which also seemed to please them. I think they knew that my three city-dwelling companions were upset by the hunt and kill, and were vastly amused by their reactions as they tried to bite into the chunks of meat. Angi, whose motto seemed to be “I’ll try anything once” was the most successful; Bura ate as little as she thought she could get away with and looked extremely uncomfortable; Ching finally forced a mouthful down, but she just couldn’t conceal her disgust and refused to eat any more. I didn’t press her; I thought throwing up would be in the worst of taste.

  I was relieved to see that our tribal hosts were taking things so well, and I began to suspect that some of them, at least, were neither as naive nor as ignorant as they pretended to be.

  They had a ceremony at the end of the meal that seemed to have solemn religious overtones. Dead vetta would not keep; only the skin was savable, and you had to strip off the meat and bone from it completely and “cure” the skin in the thermal pool. When the host died, the Wardens began to die as well, and decomposition was swift. I had found this the case with fruit and berries, although not with cut wood and leaves. It was almost as if the Wardens were determined to keep a very clean, almost antiseptic, wilderness, yet knew enough to leave behind those that were useful to man.