Charon: A Dragon at the Gate

by Jack L. Chalker

  I nodded sympathetically. “I know what you mean. But you can’t let it get to you. You have to figure that you’re alive, and you’re still you and not some psych’s dream, and that you’ve got a whole new start in a whole new life. It isn’t as bad as all that.” But, of course, it was. She was from the civilized worlds and probably had never even seen a frontier settlement. Her world, a world she not only had loved but had taken entirely for granted, was now totally and irrevocably gone.

  Come to think of it, so was mine.

  She walked over and sat on the edge of her bed. “Oh, what’s the use? It seems to me that being dead would be better than this.”

  “No, death is never better than life. Besides, you have to consider that you’re really pretty special to the Confederacy. There’s only eleven of us out of the—what? Hundreds?—convicted at the same time. They saw something in us that they didn’t want to lose. In a sense, they’re saying we’re better than almost all the people in the Confederacy.”

  “Different, anyway,” she responded. “I don’t know. I just don’t. Spending the rest of my life in this rotten place.” She looked me straight in the eye. “What makes you so special? What did you do to get here?”

  Well, here it was—acid test early on. I decided to take a very mild gamble, but first a proper priming. “You know you aren’t supposed to ask that.”

  She was beginning to relax a little now, and moved to get rid of her own wet clothes. “Something you’re ashamed of?” she asked. “Funny. I never thought it mattered.”

  “It doesn’t matter to you?”

  She thought a moment as she dried her hair. “No, not really. I’m Zala Embuay, by the way.”

  “Park Lacoch,” I responded, tensing a bit to see if it got any reaction. He—I—was pretty damned notorious.

  She let it pass without a glimmer of recognition. Well, that was something, anyway.

  “Well, Park Lacoch, weren’t you some sort of criminal?”

  “Weren’t we all?”

  She shook her head. “No, not me. I’m different. I may be the only person ever sent to the Warden Diamond because I was an innocent victim.”

  I was finding it hard to take her seriously. “How’s that?”

  She nodded seriously. “You’ve never heard of the Triana family?”

  It was my turn to betray ignorance. “Nope.”

  “Well, the Trianas are the ranking political family on Takanna. Ever been there?”

  “No, can’t say I have,” I admitted.

  “Well, you know at least what it’s like to be a ranking political family, don’t you?”

  You bet I did—but Lacoch would have been a little more removed. “I understand it, although I’m a frontier man myself. I’ve been to many of the civilized worlds but I’ve never actually lived on one.”

  “That’s what I mean. You’re much better equipped for someplace like this.”

  “The frontier’s not as wild and primitive as you think,” I told her. “In comparison to the civilized worlds, yes, but it’s nothing at all like this. Believe me, our backgrounds may be very different but they’re much more alike than either of us is to the people who were born here.”

  I’m not sure she accepted that truism, but she let it pass. “Well, anyway, I was raised in a government house, had a happy childhood and was being prepared for an administrative slot. Everything was going right when all of a sudden, the Security Service came in one day and arrested my designated mother and me.”

  I understood what she meant by that. All people of the civilized world were born in vitro, perfect products of genetic engineering, predesigned and predestined for their lives and careers. Each career on a civilized world was a Family, and when children were five they were given to a designated member of that Family unit to be raised and educated. “What was the charge?” I asked her, really interested now. I wondered whose territory Takanna was in.

  “Well, they charged her with unauthorized genetic manipulation,” she told me. “They claimed I was a special product—product!—illegally created and born.”

  I sat up, all ears. This was interesting. “You look perfectly normal to me,” I assured her. “Just what were you supposed to be that you weren’t supposed to be?”

  “That’s just it! They wouldn’t tell me! They said it would be better that I didn’t know, and maybe if I didn’t the truth wouldn’t make any difference. That’s what’s so frustrating about it all. How would you like to be told one day that you’re a freak, but not told how or in what way?”

  “And you haven’t a clue? Your mother never indicated anything?”

  “Nothing. I’ve searched and searched my whole childhood, and I haven’t come up with anything that anyone found odd or unusual. I do admit I found the whole business of administration pretty boring, but a lot of it is boring. And I never saw her after the arrest, so I never got a chance to talk to anybody else who might know and would tell me.” “And for that they shipped you here?”

  She nodded. “They told me it was for my own good; that I’d do all right here, that I could never fit into the civilized worlds. Just like that, I’m a convicted criminal—and here I am.”

  I studied her face and manner as she spoke and came to a conclusion. The tale was pretty bizarre, but it had a ring of truth to it. It was just the kind of thing the Confederacy would do. It would be interesting to know why she couldn’t have been recultured or simply shifted elsewhere. There was no such thing as a criminal gene, of course, but there were hormonal and enzyme causes for a large number of physical and mental tendencies, from violence to anger to schizophrenia. If her story rang true all the way, it meant I might be sharing a room with a ticking bomb. Still, if she ever learned the complete truth about Park Lacoch she might think the same thing—and be wrong.

  “Well, if it’s any comfort to you, I’m something of a freak myself, as you can see,” I told her. “You get cases like me out on the frontier, where there’s all sorts of complications in the different planetary conditions—radiation, you name it—and most births are the old-fashioned kind, of mother and father. By ‘like me’ I don’t really mean exactly like me, just—well, unusual.”

  “You do look—well, unusual,” she said cautiously. “I mean, most of the frontier people seem to be so big and hairy.”

  I chuckled. “Well, not quite, but my small size is only part of it. Tell me, just seeing me in the clothes and now, what do I look like? How old would you say I was?”

  She thought a moment. “Well, I know you’re a lot older just by the way you talk, but, well, to be honest, you look like … well …”

  “I look like a ten-year-old girl, right?”

  She sighed. “Well, yeah. But I know you aren’t. Even your voice is kinda, well, in between, though.”

  That was news. My voice sounded like a sharp but definite tenor to me. I had the advantage of all that information Krega had fed into my fanny, and I was beginning to understand Park Lacoch a little more.

  “Well, I’m twenty-seven,” I told her, “and I’ve looked this way since I was twelve. Puberty brought me pubic hair, a slightly deeper voice, and that was it. It wasn’t until I was sixteen, though, that my folks were able to get me to a really good meditech. They found out that I was a mutation, a real freak. A hermaphrodite, they called it”

  “A—you mean you’re both sexes?”

  “No, not really. I’m a man, but I’m probably the only man you’ll ever meet who’s a man entirely by choice. Inside I have the makings of both, but the psychs and meditechs struck a balance, and that’s the way I’ll stay—because I wanted it. They could have adjusted the other way and, with a minimum amount of surgery, I’d have wound up female.” Poor Lacoch, I’d reflected more than once. Confused totally about his sexual identity, hung up in a limbo not of his own making, permanently small and girlish. No wonder he went nuts. The file said he even masqueraded as a young girl to lure his victims away. I wondered if he’d have been different, perhaps better of
f, if he’d chosen to be female instead—but he hadn’t, and while seventeen victims was a terrible price, here and now, in his body, I was damned glad to be a man.

  “Then, in a way you and I are alike,” Zala said, fascinated. “We’re both genetic freaks. The only difference is, you know what’s wrong. I wish I did.”

  I nodded. “Maybe you will now. Or maybe this Warden organism will just wipe out the problem. It’s supposed to do that.”

  The idea sobered her a bit “I’d almost forgotten about that Funny, I don’t feel … well … infected.”

  “Neither do I, but we are. Bet on it”

  Then without warning, she returned to the original conversation. “Ah, Park?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “What did you do to get here?”

  I sighed. “What I did I won’t do again,” I told her. “It was a terrible sickness, Zala—mental illness that came from a lot of things, including my physical condition. The psychs cured me of that, though, and I’ve never been more sane in my life. That alone is really worth the price. I was in real hell, Zala, back home. I may be a prisoner here, but I’m free for the first time in my life. I was a district administrator, by the way, so we do have a little more in common.”

  She wasn’t buying the stall. “Park, why won’t you tell me what you did?”

  I sighed. “Because if I did you wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep while we were together, that’s why.”

  She thought for a moment. “You … killed somebody, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “A woman?”

  Again I just nodded.

  She hesitated. “More than one?”

  Again I could only nod and wish this conversation hadn’t come up.

  “A lot?”

  I sighed and sat back up on my bed. “Look, let’s stop playing games. I really don’t want to remember that part of myself. It’s like I was somebody else, Zala. It was a terrible, terrible madness, a sickness. Looking back on it makes me more nauseated than people who remember it or were there. I swear to you, though, that they have to terminate anybody they can’t cure of such madness, and the fact that I’m here proves that I’m cured. They could have sent me back on the streets with perfect confidence and in perfect safety, but my case was so notorious and I’m so physically distinctive that I would have been lynched, or worse. The Diamond was the only way out for me and, believe it or not, I’m grateful For the first time I can be a whole human being—and that means a lot to me, even here on this pesthole.”

  She smiled. “Then I’m your acid test, because I don’t want to be here. If you’re lying, and you kill me, well, at least it’ll be over. And if you’re telling the truth, both of us will know it and maybe, together, we can survive this place.”

  “Sounds fair to me,” I told her sincerely. A temporary alliance, anyway. I did have a woman left to kill, but it wasn’t Zala Embuay.

  They knocked on our doors shortly after that, and we trooped downstairs again like a convention of bathhouse enthusiasts. I had some trouble with the robe on the stairs, but I managed to keep from tripping.

  Our hosts, in fresh black clothes of the same kind we’d been issued, but looking dry and prim, were waiting for us. In the center of the lobby area a table had been set with a lot of steaming dishes on it, and eleven place settings.

  The food was all natural, which was bizarre enough, but the tastes and textures were also rather odd. I won’t go into a catalogue of the meal, but I had the feeling that, with the stew anyway, we really didn’t want to know what was in it For the six civilized-worlds prisoners, Zala included, it was probably the first nonsynthetic, non-computer-balanced and -prepared meal they had ever had, and they showed it. The rest of us rude frontiersmen and women ate with gusto. As I said, I really didn’t want to know what the stuff was, but it was good and highly but delicately spiced. At least the food was going to be decent here.

  Our native guides obviously had either, already eaten or would eat later. They busied themselves setting up a large chart stand and adjusting lights and the like until we were through.

  Eating mostly in silence but feeling for the first time a lot more human, we finally finished and waited anxiously on our hosts.

  The man began. “I am Garal,” he introduced himself, “and this is Tiliar. We’ve been assigned this job by the Honuth District Supervisor, acting for and at the command of the planetary government. We are both former prisoners ourselves, so we know what you’re going through. Let’s start out by saying that you must have fears and odd superstitions about the Warden Diamond, and we want to assure you that those fears have no. basis. You’re not going to get sick—in fact, you will most likely not notice any real difference between yourselves before and yourselves here. It is true, though, that your bodies are even now altering in minute and undetectable ways. Within a few days you and the Warden organism will reach a state of what we like to call ‘alliance.’ Let me emphasize that you are not sick. In fact, in the five years I’ve been here I’ve never been sick, not once. The Wardens are far more effective than any body defense in killing off viruses and any other disease organisms you might have brought with you—the ones native here are too alien to do you any harm—as well as infection and a host of other ills. You can appreciate the fact that, in a climate like this, nobody ever gets a cold.”

  That brought a small chuckle from us, but it was an important aspect of this world. Back in the civilized worlds people never got sick much either, but that was due to the immediate access to the best medical facilities. Here, if Garal was to be believed, doctors and the like were simply not necessary.

  “Some of you may find a little discomfort in one or two areas,” Tiliar put in, “because you aren’t healthy enough. Anyone who has chipped or lost a tooth, for example, may find it growing back, which can be an irritating thing. Anyone who has vision problems might experience some dizziness or slight headaches as whatever problems you had are corrected. The Warden organism doesn’t just keep you from getting worse, it makes you better. And it keeps you that way. Cuts heal quickly and rarely leave a scar; even whole limbs are often regenerated if tost”

  “You make it sound like we’re immortal,” the big prisoner with the single room commented.

  “No, not immortal,” she replied. “Fatal wounds Outside are fatal wounds here. The Wardens use your own body’s natural abilities to keep you healthy and whole, but if your body can’t fix it, well, neither can they. However, more people on Charon die from external causes than natural causes. With the Warden ability to repair and even replace brain cells, your potential lifespan in a healthy body is longer than in the civilized worlds.”

  Most of those at the table, Zala included, heard only the second part of that statement and seemed pleased. I was much more interested in the implication that a lot of people died here from unnatural causes. I couldn’t forget the teeth on those baby blue lizards.

  Our guides followed up with a general rundown of the planet, much of which I already knew. It was interesting in the context of the torrential rams to discover that there were a few deserts on the central continent, often the only places where blue sky was seen for more than brief periods. Water, it seemed, was feast or famine on Charon—mostly feast. But in those dry areas it might rain once a century. Additionally, there were violent storms, tabarwinds they were called, that were quick and deadly and could strike out of nowhere with tremendous lightning charges and winds of over 160 kilometers per hour. Much of the weather, including these storms, could not be accurately predicted since a layer in the upper atmosphere had an odd field of electrically charged particles that fouled most conventional radars, infrared cameras, and the like, while artificial electrical fields on the ground attracted the full fury of tabarwinds. I began to see a practical reason why they kept technology at a minimum level. The spaceport was immediately shut down at the first sign of such tabarwinds, and, even so, it had been hit and destroyed twice in the memory of these two people. The shutt
le had special protection against many of these electrical fields, but was not totally immune.

  As with all the Warden worlds, a “research” space station was maintained in orbit well outside the range of any nasty stuff, but it was closed to unauthorized personnel. It was an interesting fact that on those space stations the Warden organism would infect anyone that it came into contact with, but would leave all the inorganic material alone. Its full properties were operative only on one of the planets, and then only on people affected with the same breed of organism.

  That brought us to what we really wanted to know. “In addition to the total lack of technological comforts,” Garal told us, “there is a by-product of the Warden affiliation that is, well, hard to accept even after you’ve seen it. There’s a different by-product on each of the four Diamond worlds, all relating to the fact that the tiny Wardens are, somehow, in some sort of contact or communication with one another. On Lilith, for example, some people have the power literally to move, build, or destroy mountains with a thought, by telling their Wardens to give orders to other Wardens in the rocks, trees, other people, you name it. But the degree of power an individual has is arbitrary. On Cerberus this communication is so bizarre that people can literally exchange minds with each other—and it’s so universal that they often do so without meaning to. No control. On Medusa, the Warden communication is so limited that it’s really only within one’s own body, and causes rapid and involuntary shape-changing to meet whatever environment the person finds him or herself in. Here—well, things are a bit different but still related.”

  We were all silent now, raptly intent on the speaker. Here was the heart of the Charon experience—what we would become.

  “As on Lilith, we have a certain power over objects and people,” Tiliar jumped in, taking up the talk. “As on Cerberus, it is a mental ability rather than a physical one, and mind-to-mind contact is possible. As on Medusa, physical change is possible, but in a different sense. And, while these powers are not arbitrary—that is, everyone has these abilities—it takes great training and discipline to be able to use them properly, while those with the training and control can use them on you. That’s why we cautioned you to avoid the locals for a while.” She paused for a moment, carefully considering her words.