Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail flotd-4

by Jack L. Chalker

  “While we have been having this talk, Ching was picked up and taken to the psych used only by my special branch. Oh, don’t look so worried—there will be no change. All we’ve done is to reinforce a weakness already obvious in her. She practically worships you now. From this point, that will simply dominate. You’ll notice no change, nor will she even be aware that she’s been to a psych—as far as she’s concerned, she’ll have been waiting for you in your room all this time. But she will be very uncritical of your attitudes and inclinations on the social and political front. She was born and raised here. As a loyal native, she would bave turned you in for your own good, or reported anything odd to us. She won’t now. If you say to betray the government, she will go along with you. If you join the Opposition, she will go along and accept it. And if you later betray the Opposition, she will think all the more highly of you for it. They will have no trouble passing her on that basis. That is one reason we thought of her as a logical pair-mate for you. As with most totally frustrated people, she is an incurable fantasizing romantic.”

  I didn’t like the idea of messing with Ching’s mind—she had enough problems as it was—but it didn’t seem too bad, and it would keep her out of trouble as long as I was all right. However, she would now be exposed to exactly the same dangers—and fate—from either side that I faced, and she was not well prepared for it. I liked her too much not to worry about what might happen, but I was a. professional. If it had to be, it had to be—and, if it came down to her or me, I knew I would have no such romantic notions.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Disloyal Opposition

  Ching was, as promised, no different on my return than when I’d left her and, also as advertised, she told me that she’d been waiting in the room for me worriedly for the previous few hours. If I hadn’t been told differently, I would have sworn she was narrating the correct version of events, rather than just what she was told to remember.

  Two days later we were both summoned to the Guild Hall for an audience with a top-grade supervisor. I played the surprised worker that Ching genuinely was. There we were informed that we had shown ourselves more than capable of higher positions. Effective immediately, we were being promoted to In-Service Passenger Attendants, Grade 6, and would shortly be assigned for a week of training and evaluation. Since we’d been Grade 3s (I never did learn what Is and 2s were—I could hardly imagine anything lower than bus cleaners) this was a substantial jump, although it was, of course, contingent on our successful training and initial job performance evaluations. The job actually only warranted a Grade 5, but the extra bump was given because we would now have two homes many kilometers apart, and would have double toiletries and the like. At our previous level you owned virtually nothing at all—you couldn’t afford it—but, while we wouldn’t be very well off compared to many others, we7 would now have a bit left over from basic expenses for luxuries.

  We presented our cards, which were run through a computer and popped back to us apparently unchanged, but we knew that the information now reflected increased grade and status. We also had two days until our new shift, an afternoon one, would properly cycle so we could join our crew. We actually had some time to kill and made the most of it. Ching was particularly excited and pleased by the turn of events, and I tried as hard as I could to share in her joy and excitement. Doing so was tough when you knew what was really going on.

  Two days later we went down to the main passenger terminal and found Shift Supervisor Morphy, a distinguished-looking woman in early middle age who looked a little like civilized worlders. A native most definitely, I decided, but a child or grandchild of a civilized worlder and a frontier type. These were very common on Medusa.

  The job wasn’t very glamorous or exciting, despite the fancy titles. Basically we patrolled the cars, wiping passenger’s noses, answering then: stupid questions, explaining how to get food or drink or how to operate the seat terminals as well as making sure that all the amenities were working properly. In some ways this was worse than cleaning buses. In that job, I mostly stood around and goofed off while seeing that the cleaning machines did their jobs properly, while here I was constantly exposed to the public and observed by shift supervisors as I walked from one end of the train to the other and back. And I had to be very neat, and very clean, and always smile, smile. …

  In one way the job was similar to tracking down and confronting criminals. Both were filled with repetition and long, boring stretches, yet both were at the same time interesting and disgusting.

  Our train usually had two or three passenger cars and the rest freight. The freight level remained constant but the passenger car number increased or decreased according to demand. In the first week we had one six-car passenger train and another that had only one, but never did we have a run with none.

  The training period was really grating at tunes, with every little thing criticized. I almost belted Morphy more than once. The week seemed to last forever. Finally, though, we were on our own and less closely supervised, and things eased up a bit.

  Train crews had distinctive uniforms, nicely tailored and with overly large insignia on them. Since a lot of our own Guild’s members used the trains to get to and from where they were needed, there had to be some way to tell the specific train’s crew from others in transportation. We looked, in fact, pretty elegant by Medusan standards, but that was par for the course. I remember a fancy resort once, long ago, that used a lot of human attendants just to give the place a more elegant and personal feel, and the best-dressed people in the joint were the doorman and the waiters.

  Our new room in Rochande was virtually identical to the one back in Gray Basin, the only difference being that it was on the third, not the fourth, floor and the beds were against the left rather than the right wall. A mirror image, basically, to remind us where we were.

  Rochande, however, was quite different from Gray Basin if only because of its geography. It was a food-distribution center for the region, and, therefore, a space-freight port. It was also pretty far south, comparatively speaking, and while the winter still hit it was neither long nor hard, and the city was on the surface rather than dug in and roofed over. There were also huge forests around, and quite a number of exotic plants, which gave the place a whole different feel, even if the city’s pie-shaped design and dull, blocky architecture was depressingly familiar.

  The trip south, once through the electronic barricades of Gray Basin, was interesting, too. You could see the climate gradually change as you moved south, with occasional breaks in the thinning snow patches, showing hardy grasses at first, then some bushes, and eventually increasingly larger trees. Finally we were more or less out of the hard winter and into a more temperate zone. The world was not nearly as bad as Gray Basin made it seem, though there was not a sign of cultivation or even roads in sight for the entire distance. More than the climate and vegetation changes, that was the true contrast on Medusa, one brought home with every trip. In the cities and towns, and on the sleek, smooth, modern trains, you were in a highly technological, modern society though a regimented one. Outside the cities was a primitive world.

  It was a world that was said to have genuine threats although I’d been able to learn very little about it. Basically, the people were very secure in their modern pockets on this wilderness world and most of them had never been beyond their society’s protection. What exactly was out there, other than wild and vicious animals, some of whom could change their shape, was really unknown. I found the stories about shape-changing most interesting and made it a point to research those animals as much as I could with the library access on the terminal. Apparently the Medusans didn’t even like to study these creatures, at least not publicly. If, in fact, some of those creatures could shape-change—something not even alluded to in the descriptions—I could see why Medusan authorities wouldn’t want the opportunity to plant ideas like mine into crooked heads.

  The dominant life forms were mammals, however, something I found inter
esting but logical—reptiles couldn’t really have much of a future on a world as cold as this, and insects would have too short a developmental season each year to do more than fill an ecological niche. Even the ocean creatures, as far as was known, were air-breathing mammals, since, apparently, the algae and plankton that would support a real fishy evolution was low, and the seas were relatively shallow.

  The familiar pattern of animal development was here, though, with one vegetarian species called vettas eating mostly grasses and another called tubros eating mostly leaves and other parts of trees, apparently instinctively trimming but not killing. The big, nasty brutes were the harrar, who mostly ate vettas and tubros. There were several hundred subspecies of the two vegetarian types, and several varieties of harrar. The rest of the animal kingdom was varied, vast, and mostly invisible, but fitted into the normal balance of nature in totally expected ways. I concentrated on the dominant life forms, except for the smaller creatures that were poisonous or nasty, because I hoped to find some clues in the big ones to what I was looking for.

  As for looks, the vettas had large, flat, toothy bills, big, round eyes, short necks, and legs that were very wide, clawed, and padded, and yet they could move when they had to, at speeds up to forty kilometers per hour for short distances. The tubros had long, thin snouts, necks that bent in all directions and were longer than their bodies, and enormous, clawed limbs that were almost handlike. Their tails somewhat resembled their necks, and they occasionally used these tails as decoys when checking to see if the coast was clear. Apparently the tails came out if bitten. Tubros weren’t very fast, but they could climb trees in a flash and could sleep either right side up or upside down, clinging to strong branches or trunks. Vettas had no real defense except their speed; tubros, however, could be nasty when cornered, and could use that tail of theirs like a whip.

  The harrar was the hardest to phi down. Mostly it looked like a huge, undulating mass of fur, skin, and taloned feet that were almost birdlike. It generally walked, looking ridiculous, on those legs; but when it caught prey, two small, nasty hands in that fur were strong enough to tear heads off. Somewhere in that lump, was the biggest mouth relative to body size that I’d ever seen, with row upon row of teeth. The harrar interested me the most, since it was, according to the legends, a shape-changer. This critter would need to eat a lot to feed that big body, and it could hardly climb trees or outrun anything going forty kilometers per hour.

  The sea creatures seemed to mirror those on land, except that there were more levels with far greater interdependence, starting with the little slugs that ate bacterialike organisms near the surface and also scavenged the bottom, up to water-born counterparts of the vettas and tubros. Despite smooth sides and flippers and fins, these looked very much like their land counterparts—but were omnivores, eating smaller animals as well as surface and bottom water plants. There was also an amphibious version of the harrar, which appeared to be a one-ton or more lump of gray or black with dorsal and tail fins, little beady eyes, a big, big mouth—and little else. This sea carnivore, called makhara, seemed totally unable to cope with swift prey—yet it had to do pretty well to keep that mass of fat happy. How did it do it? How, in fact, could it even grab its prey? These questions, too, were not only unanswered in the texts, they were unasked.

  There were no tubros north of the twenty-eighth parallel, where the trees became too small or intermittent to support such life. But there were snow vettas able to burrow under meters of snow and ice to get at whatever was down there, and harrar to hunt them. That, too, was interesting. Lots of stuff on the unique life cycle of the snow vetta, nothing but a mention that the harrar were there. That implied that there were no snow harrar, and again brought up an interesting question: how did the dark, bulky, ungainly harrar ever catch its quota of snow vetta, many of whom spent most of their time burrowing deep beneath the snows?

  Ching, to my surprise, became interested in some of my studies. It was amazing to me that someone born and raised on Medusa knew so little about the bulk of the planet. But she was aware of her ignorance—after first confessing that, until I looked into these things, she’d never even thought about them—and eager to fill the gap.

  One thing was for sure—they were really scared of those harrar, even ia the highest councils of Medusa. You had only to think of the double energy guard around Gray Basin’s entrances, and even Rochande had a double perimeter fence of the same lethal energy barrier around it. Of course, such a system, for the protection of the public—sold and accepted as such—also kept the people tightly inside their monitored cities and protected trains. Even those trains were sealed compartments, totally insulated from the outside world, almost as if they were spacecraft sealing off their occupants from some lethal, alien environment.

  Man had always triumphed over the most vicious and lethal carnivores on world after world. Yet here it seemed almost as if the legendary harrar were allowed to breed and roam and multiply; and they probably were, not so much from technological as from political motives. Raised in insulated cradle-to-grave technological pockets, most Medusans probably couldn’t survive a day without those conveniences they took for granted. This suited the Medusan authorities very well indeed.

  Whether the doing of Ypsir or of his predecessor, this was a unique society and something of a work of genius, based on the fact that Lilith and Charon supplied so much food there was no necessity to raise any on Medusa, and technology had maintained the closed culture of Medusa and fed it.

  We worked some six weeks with nothing happening, and I was beginning to grow bored and worried and fidgety once more. Neither TMS nor this mysterious Opposition I only half believed in had surfaced, and I was beginning to wrack my brain once more for a different opening.

  Ching dismissed my irritation as moodiness, something she was used to by now, but I was determined to do something to get me off dead center and beat the system. Of course, just when I’d given up all hope or belief in the Opposition, I heard from them. And heard is the right word, although they took a leaf from Krega’s notebook.

  We had a separate crew’s toilet on the train, just forward of the first passenger car, and, as usual, I went there to take a piss. Such occasions were one of the very few times I was separated not only from Ching, who had to keep working while I went and vice versa, but also from the supervisors and general passengers. There was, of course, a monitoring device in. the John.

  “Tarin Bul?” I heard the voice, electronically distorted, and looked up and around, puzzzled. I’d been called by vox on the terminal many times, but the voices had never sounded as inhuman as this.

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve been watching you, Tarin Bul.”

  “Aren’t you always?” I cracked, zipping up my pants and going to the washbasin.

  “We are not TMS,” the voice told me. “We do not like TMS very much. We suspect that, by now, you don’t like them much, either.”

  I shrugged and washed my hands. “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t on that one,” I told the voice sincerely. “If this is a test by TMS and I say I don’t like them, I’ll get picked up and asked why. If, on the other hand, I say I just love TMS, they’ll pick me up for sure and rush me to the nearest psych. So I’ll pass on the answer, and unless there’s something else I’ve got to go back to work.”

  “We are not TMS,” the voice told me. “We are in opposition to the TMS and the current government of Medusa. We are powerful enough to feed a false signal, recorded earlier, of you sitting on the toilet to TMS monitors while we use this channel to talk to you.”

  “Says you,” I retorted.

  “You’re no native, programmed to this life. Why do you not accept what we say?”

  “For one thing, if you’re that powerful you don’t need me. And if you do need me, and are that powerful, then you’re either phony or pretty, incompetent rebels.”

  “We don’t need you,” the voice responded. “We want you. That is a different thing
. The more people in more guilds we have, the stronger we become, the better able to manage this world after it is ours. You in particular have two attributes of value to us. You have mobility due to your job, which is invaluable in our society. And, you are not a native of this world, and sooner or later it will drive you crazy.”

  “Maybe it already has,” I said, retaining my skeptical tone. “But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I believe you’re who and what you say. What good does it do me?”

  “Listen carefully, for we will say this only once, and time is short. Someone will soon miss you and come in demanding to know why you are not back at work. You have one chance and one chance only to join us. At your next layover at Rochande you have a day off. Go to the matinee show at the Grand Theater that day. Sit in the balcony. Leave to go to the bathroom halfway through the first act. We will contact you.”

  “And my pair-mate?”

  “Not at the first meeting. Later we will arrange for her as well. This communication is ended. Guard your comments.”

  And, with that, things were, allegedly, back to normal. I left quickly and returned to work. Ching noticed that I seemed cheerier than I had for weeks, but couldn’t figure out why.

  We always went out for a special meal and a show on our day off and when I suggested the Grand, Ching wasn’t the least surprised. As instructed long ago, I keyed in the code on my terminal that told me how much credit we had for our day on the town—and simultaneously let my TMS contact know that things had, finally, started to roll. I had no intention of double-crossing either side until Td gotten what I wanted from this assignment, and certainly not until I could get away with it.

  When you’re sitting in the middle of a dark and crowded theater you-can instantly make yourself a villain in a number of ways, but the worst is to go to the bathroom in the middle of the show. I finally made it to the aisle through the curses and dirty looks—made worse by the sure and certain knowledge that I’d be back—and proceeded to the upper lobby, where the large rest room was located. As I passed the last row of seats—far more sparsely populated since they were so far from the screen you might as well have dialed the show on your terminal—a hand shot out from a darkened seat, grabbed my arm, and pulled me over with such force I almost lost my balance.