Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Oh, my, no. I’m not going to Centrum, unfortunately. But there’s plenty of room on the shuttle, and I’ve logged you as my guest as far as Centrum, with a return on the morning flight. The trip is still going to cost you some money you probably don’t” have—Centrum’s not cheap—but you’ll get there and back and be able to deposit your papers with no one the wiser at your end, since I’ve cleared it on my personal assurance.”

  I could hardly believe this. “You mean you want me to come with you?”

  He nodded. “And better hurry. We’re about to board. Well? How about it?”

  I considered his offer. Out there was freedom. The shuttle meant new dangers, and I was probably too late to do much anyway, even if I could find them. Still, I’d come this far, and this seemed the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances, so I nodded. “All right, sir—and thanks.”

  Of course, the question I had weighed was not that hard to answer. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has this kind of luck. When too many things keep going right, you just have to know you’re being had. I don’t know whose bodies they’d found, or where my slip had come, but somebody had gotten a lot of laughs at seeing me do my routine, knowing all the while that I was a day late and didn’t realize it.

  Obviously escape was out. They’d never let me make the door, and it would be a very uncomfortable ride. It seemed to me that going along with things would at least bring me close to Ching and Hono, even if very dangerously, and I was still, not without resources.

  The shuttle was the same comfortable craft I remembered, only now there were only the two government bureaucrats and myself aboard. The takeoff was smooth and effortless, although not without the press of many gravities into the soft foam seats and the unsettling but thrilling feeling when the boost was cut off.

  “Dunecal, next stop, five minutes,” the speaker said crisply. “Remain in your seats and strapped in at all times.” That surprised me, since I’d assumed we were going directly to Centrum, where my welcoming committee would be waiting. But, sure enough, we descended smoothly and were soon in Dunecal, main city of the central continent, and my benefactor’s destination. He wished me well, and departed, acting for all the world as if he had no idea who or what I really was—and he may not have known, I reflected.

  “Loading passengers now,” the speaker announced. “Centrum next stop.”

  I thought about jumping ship at this point, but there seemed no purpose to it. I was hooked and was being reeled in slowly for the amusement of whatever sportsman was on the other end.

  Three passengers boarded at Dunecal, a man and woman in government black and another young woman whose looks were so startlingly different I almost had to stare.

  Women on Medusa were no beauties. Oh, once you got used to them they were fine, but all were chunky, and had a masculine muscularity about them. There was, after all, a chance that anybody could flip from one sex to the other and so the average person was a bit of both, really. I had frankly almost forgotten the difference between normal human ‘and Medusan females until this young woman came on.

  She was certainly Medusan—her casual clothes would not have been sufficient protection for anybody else—but, then again, she wasn’t. Her olive skin looked far softer than the tough hide we all took for granted. She was built as few women I’d met were built and had mastered all the right sexy moves. She also had a sweet, sexy smile on her very pretty face and her hair was longer than normal and light brown—the first of such a color I’d ever seen on Medusa, and one I’d rarely seen anywhere else, for that matter.

  “Take that seat and strap in, Tix,” the man instructed.

  She smiled. “Oh, yes, my lord,” she said in a childish-sounding yet sexy voice, and did as instructed. I noticed she never stopped smiling and just about never took her eyes off him. The other two strapped themselves in and the man noticed me staring at the young woman.

  “Never seen a Goodtime Girl before, huh?” he called out conversationally.

  I shook my head. “No, sir. I’m from Gray Basin, and we don’t see any there.”

  “I daresay,” he answered with pride. “You just arrest ‘em and send “em to us and we make ‘em.” He chuckled at that.

  I responded with a smile I didn’t feel. There was something creepy about Tix, something unnatural.

  I’d heard mentions of Goodtime Girls, of course. Everybody had. Entertainers, consorts, concubines, and a little of everything else, it was said—mostly for the entertainment and gratification of the bigwigs. But nobody I had ever talked to had actually seen one, or really knew anything about them except that theirs was a different kind of job. I always wondered why, on a planet ninety-percent female, there weren’t Goodtime Boys.

  The man proved chatty. Either he, too, was ignorant of who I was or he was putting on a mighty fine act. I gave him my cover story, with the truth when explaining what I was doing on the shuttle. He seemed to accept it.

  Goodtime Girls, it seemed, weren’t employees, they were slaves. Oh, he didn’t call Tix that, but it was clear that all the euphemisms were stand-ins for the word “slave.” They had been convicted of crimes against the state and sentenced to Ultimate Demotion. Most UDs, as he called them, were sent off to the mines of Momrath’s moons, but a few were selected and turned into Goodtime Girls by expert psychs in the government’s Criminal Division. “Some of ‘em are real artists,” he told me proudly. “You wouldn’t believe what Tix looked like before they worked on her.”

  “There are no Goodtime Boys?” I couldn’t resist asking. ” He shook his head from side to side. “Nope. Something in the process having to do with our little buggers the Wardens. When they remove the psyche or whatever it is they take out, the subject’s invariably locked in as female.” He gave a leer in Tix’s direction, and she nearly shivered with delight. “Not that I mind that a bit.”

  I had to repress the urge to shiver. In all the barbaric acts of mankind, the worst was certainly abject slavery, and probably the worst of the worst was to create willing, natural slaves with a psych guide and a pysch machine. The system seemed terribly perverted, somehow, as well as downright crazy. Why have slaves on a world where robots were happily employed? The only possible answer was instant ego-gratification for the kind of mentality that worshiped only power. This guy had been “given” Tix by the government for doing such wonderful work and reaching a government grade level that warranted a Goodtime Girl. He took her with him as a highly visible status symbol, and because he got his jollies having a personal slave to order about. It was the ultimate reflection of the sickness of this society, I thought sadly. What kind of a place was it that was run by people who had psych-created fawning slaves the way influential people in other societies owned great gems or great works of art?

  I repressed a sudden urge to kill the fellow and his companion right then and there, and maybe the Goodtime Girl, too, although, in more than one sense, she was already dead.

  About twenty minutes after takeoff the speaker came on. “Please remain strapped in your seats. We are about to dock.”

  The man and woman both frowned, and she. turned to him. “That’s odd. I didn’t feel any deceleration.”

  He nodded. “I wonder if something’s wrong?”

  There were no windows, so there was no way of knowing, but I tensed up. Here we go, I thought, and got myself mentally ready for any move that could be made.

  I felt a shudder and vibration, then three quick deceleration bursts, and we slid neatly into the dock. There was a hissing, and then the rear door slid open. The man unbuckled himself and walked over to the door, looking out, still puzzled. “This isn’t Centrum,” he said, confused. “I think this is the space station.”

  I unbuckled myself, sighed, stood up and walked back to the door. “Just go back to your seat,” I told him, “and relax. I think this is my stop.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Victim of Philosophy

  The lock was of the modern, standardized type,
with the shuttle docked in space against a long tubular entryway into the space station itself. I knew that all four planets had such stations, and that the Four Lords made good use of them. The master computer for Medusa was here, for example, but I was unprepared for the enormity of the place. It had good artificial gravity, perhaps a bit lighter than I’d become used to. From the entry tube you could look out through a transparent strip and see the gigantic structure stretching away from you on all sides. It was more than a mere space station; it was more like a small floating city several kilometers across, large enough to be self-sufficient in those things that would support a sizable population.

  At the end of the long walk up the entry tube I came upon a second airlock chamber, which I entered without hesitation. If they’d meant to kill me they could have done so far more easily and less messily elsewhere. This second lock was pretty much an insurance measure against premature leak and emergencies, but it also served as a neat security cell. Up top was the ever-present monitor, almost certainly with a real person on the other end, and a series of small and unfamiliar-looking projections that could have been either decontamination or weapons.

  The first door closed behind me, but the second did not open right away. Suddenly those projections flooded the chamber with a pale blue force field that had a rather odd effect on me. The sensation must have been similar to ‘that of being suddenly struck deaf or blind or both, yet I could see and hear perfectly well. What I no longer could do was sense or contact the Wardens within my own body. They had cut off communications, somehow, and, in so doing, had reverted me to my original form. I could see and feel it happening, with no powers except my own brain.

  The ray cut off quickly, and the outer door opened. I found it very difficult to move, though, as if heavy weights had suddenly been placed all over me. I wasn’t quite sure what they were doing, but I guessed that they, not I, were now sending to the Wardens in my body somehow, and they were telling them to produce this sensation. It was quite effective. I could still move and act normally, but any quick or sustained actions would be beyond me. I had walked into the trap, and now they had me good. I had a vague thought that I should have made a run for it back at Gray Basin, no matter what the risks, but it was a little late for that now.

  A strong-faced Medusan woman in government black waited for me in the reception lounge, along with a monitor sergeant armed with some sort of small, light sidearm. It was certainly no laser weapon, and I guessed it to be some sort of stun gun, which made perfect sense in this situation. You could shoot hostages as well as the hostage-takers with no fear of permanent injury to either, and you were unlikely to burn accidental holes in the space-station wall.

  “I am Sugah Fallon,” the woman announced, “director of this installation. You are, I would guess, the one called Tarin Bul, although I expect that that’s not your real name, either.”

  “It will do,” I told her wearily. “I see you know a lot more about the Warden organism than even I expected.”

  She smiled. “Research into the possibilities is never-ending, Bul. You would be amazed at the things we can do these days. Come. It must be days since you ate, so we’ll attend to that first.” With my every move physically restricted, I had little choice but to follow her. Besides I was starved, I had to admit.

  The food was good, and it was fresh. “We grow it all ourselves,” Fallon told me with some pride. “In fact, we support a staff here of over two thousand permanent party personnel plus half again- as many on transient business. It is from here that the entire monitoring system is guided.

  All the records are here, and all are centrally coordinated and beamed by satellite to every city on the planet. Our laboratories and technical specialists are drawn from all four Diamonds worlds, and are the best in their fields.”

  I really was impressed. “I’d like to see the whole thing sometime,” I said dryly.

  “Oh, perhaps you might, but we will show you only a few departments today, I think. You’ll be fascinated by what we’re doing in those areas, I think.”

  “Alien psychology?”

  She laughed. “No, sorry, that’s off limits. You understand we have to be somewhat circumspect with you since we know that you carry some sort of broadcaster inside your head. Until that goes I’m afraid your movements will be rather limited here.”

  “How do you know about that?” I asked, not bothering to deny it. This wasn’t a fishing expedition—they knew a whole hell of a lot.

  “We know a bit from some of your compatriots. You may be interested to know that the agent sent to Lilith did manage to kill Marek Kreegan, although in a rather oblique way, and that Aeolia Matuze of Charon is also dead, partly thanks to your man there. On Cerberus, though, your man failed, and did a most interesting thing—he joined our side without even making a. real attempt at Laroo.”

  That was news, most of it welcome. Two out of four wasn’t bad at all, everything considered. Her comment further indicated that none of the other three had revealed that they were, in fact, the same person as myself. I wondered about the turncoat on Cerberus, though—was his conversion sincere, or some sort of ongoing ruse? The fact .that he was alive and apparently influential indicated to me that he couldn’t be counted out.

  “I suppose it’s too late for me to defect,” I said half-seriously.

  “I’m afraid so. Defections under duress are so undependable. It really was nothing personal, either, that you failed. You accomplished a tremendous amount that we would have thought impossible, and you’ve caused a major reassessment of our entire monitoring system. In fact, if you hadn’t attacked the Altavar on your way out, you would still be free and a tremendous threat to us. Even so, you could have escaped. You have a weak spot, a sentimental streak, that your compatriots seem to lack. It’s what’s done you in.”

  I shrugged. “I owed it to them to see what I could do. Besides, if I couldn’t pull it off, I was neutralized anyway, with no hope of ever really doing anything beyond living with the Wild Ones. Call it the testing of a theory—and the theory proved wrong. I simply underestimated the system. Just out of curiosity, though, I’d like to know when you got on to me.”

  “We knew you were in Gray Basin when we sent somebody to check on the missing monitor at the station,” she told me. “However, we really didn’t have any idea of who you were until you punched Ching Lu Kor into the computer. Since the monitor you were pretending to be didn’t have knowledge of, interest in, or anything to do with that case, it raised a flag here. From that point on, of course, we had you. We were pretty certain it was you, since few others would have the combination of nerve and timing to pull off such a thing even that far.” She paused, then added, “You should have kept switching identities every hour or so.”

  I nodded, then added, “I could still have gotten away if I hadn’t misjudged how long I’d slept. That was my key mistake and I admit it. One little mistake in a long string of successes, but that’s all you get in this business.”

  “That’s why the system always wins. We can make a hundred mistakes, but you can make only one.”

  ‘Tell that to those two you said are dead.”

  The comment didn’t faze her. “Their systems were quite different from ours. Technology doesn’t even work on Lilith, and it’s easily negated by a strong mind on Charon. They will have to develop systems better suited to their own homes, as we have evolved this one.”

  “I’m not very impressed with this one,” I told her. “It’s a dull, stupefying world of sheep you’ve created down there, people without drive, ambition, or guts. And for the elite on top, human slaves kept as status pets—like something out of the Dark Ages of man.”

  She didn’t take offense. Her reply, in fact, was indirect and at first I didn’t see where she was going. “Tell me one thing that’s puzzled me, Tarin Bul or whatever your name is. Just one thing. I know you’ve been conditioned so that we can’t get any information from you by force, but I would like to know the answer
to one question.”

  “Perhaps. What is it?”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” I was very confused.

  “Are you really as blindly naive as you say you are, or is there a real reason why you continued doggedly on your mission once you were here?”

  “I told you I found your system repugnant.”

  “Do you really? And what are the civilized worlds if not an enormous collection of sheep, bred to be happy, bred to do their specific jobs without complaint, and also without ambition or imagination. They look prettier, that’s all—but they don’t have to survive the hard climate of Medusa. What you see down there is simply a local adaptation, a reflection of the civilized worlds themselves. And do you know why? Because most people are sheep and are perfectly content to be led if they are guaranteed security, a home, job, protection, and a full belly. In the whole history of humankind, whenever people demanded democracy and total independence and got it, they were willing and eager to trade their precious freedom for security—every time. Every time. To the strong-willed, the people who knew what to do and had the guts to do it. The people who prize personal power above all else.”

  “We don’t have cameras in people’s bathrooms,” I responded lamely.

  “Because you don’t need cameras in the bathroom. You’ve had centuries of the best biotechnology around to breed out all thoughts of deviant activity, and a barrier not of energy but of tens of thousands of light-years of space to keep out social contamination. The few who slip by, people like you, are sent here. That’s why so many of them wind up in charge, and why the system here is a reflection of the civilized worlds. We grew up there, too, Bul, so it’s the system we know and understand best. We’re the people most fit to rule, not by our own say-so, but the Confederacy’s. That’s why we got sent here.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out.