Jack Chalker - Medusa - A Tiger by the Tail

Yatek Morah turned in the same instant, a laser pistol in his hand, and pointed it at Ypsir. “Oh, shut up, Talant,” he sighed wearily, and pulled the trigger. Ypsir collapsed instantly into unconsciousness and slid beneath the table. They all looked down at the crumpled heap and saw it slowly changing back to the familiar face they knew, the expression alone soon becoming the only measure of the hate that was inside him.

Kunser entered the room from the back dorm in an instant, but they all saw immediately that he was not threatening. “Let me get a couple of people in here and get him back upstairs,” he pleaded. “We have a lot of work to do.”

Morah nodded and bolstered the weapon. “We will move everyone we can to the southern continent of Charon at the start,” he told the Medusan assistant. “If time becomes short, we’ll start putting them down wherever we can on Lilith. Cerberus simply can’t handle any such loads. Tell Ypsir when he wakes up that he can settle scores in eight days. If he does anything else than exactly what this meeting decides, or in any way makes trouble before that point, he will meet the fate of his predecessor instantly. Remind him that we do not need to know where he is or what he is doing, that the Altavar can and will simply order his Wardens to consume him if any of the rest of us say so. Is that clear?”

Everyone else in the room was just getting over their stunned and shocked feelings at the proceedings when Ypsir was finally carried out and away. Even Luge remained frozen on the screen, horrified and shocked by his first direct look at what the Warden organism could do.

Only Morah remained completely in control. “These proceedings are now in indefinite recess. All parties agree that commencing seven days from 2400 this night a state of war will exist between the Altavar on the one hand and the Confederacy on the other.”

Luge seemed to snap out of it. “Any move against us prior to that point will result in even more dire consequences,” he warned. “We are allowing this period not only in hopes of a diplomatic solution but also out of common decency and mercy. If any attempt is made during this period, or is perceived by us to be made, we will abandon our plans and instead all modules will be directed by the task force with the intent of inducing the sun to nova.”

The others on both sides looked particularly shocked by the threat, but the Altavar seemed to take it in stride. “That would be most interesting,” it noted coldly. “However, it would cause quite a lot more problems than we are currently prepared to handle. We will, therefore, uphold the waiting period. But make no mistake o’n this, Senators. Neither you nor the Confederacy will survive many hours after you know just what you have done.”

The agent who called himself Mr. Carroll frowned and looked nervously at the Altavar on the screen. What an odd way to put it, he couldn’t help thinking. What a very odd way to put it…

Talant Ypsir spent most of his time brooding on his palatial orbiting satellite, but he did not interfere with the evacuation nor prevent his aides and infrastructure from doing what had to be done. For himself, though, he spent almost all of his time in his pleasure garden accompanied only by Ass, emerging only briefly to make certain that the station itself would be moved from orbit by tug.

The transports, too, were built on the modular concept, so it was relatively easy for the great ships to break into small compartments and move down to various collection pouits on the surface. These were troop transports, designed to hold half of what they were being asked to hold; but in a war without troops they could be spared by the Confederacy, which was, according to Commander Rrega, still confident that the Altavar bluff would break at the last minute.

The Medusan population proved unusually easy to move. Virtually all of them had been born and raised to obey the orders of the monitors and their superiors, so while they grumbled and complained a lot they did pretty much as they were told. There was some panic in the big cities, among groups who simply would not believe that there was a threat. Others suddenly lost faith when their well-ordered society was proven incapable of protecting them, but these were quickly quelled by monitors with efficient brutality. It was also simply stated that those who did not want to go could remain—but their lives would probably be abnormally short.

Mr. Carroll was particularly concerned about the colonies of Wild Ones. They were too spread out for all of them to be contacted easily, and most disbelieved the news if they heard it and fled into the wild. Finally, he commandeered a shuttle craft and went down to a particular settlement he knew well.

The shuttle landed not in a cradle but on a flat, something it really wasn’t designed to do but could because the possibility of an emergency landing always existed. The door opened and he emerged, the only one aboard, dressed in a protective orange spacesuit with the helmet removed. Still, he wore goggles and a small respirator as he walked up to the rock cliff with the twin waterfalls, aware for the first time of just how hard this land really was on one not redesigned as a Medusan.

The courtyard was deserted, as he’d expected, but he didn’t hesitate a moment, walking up to the one ground-level cave and inside as far back as he could. The torches were still lit, which told him that people were in fact still here somewhere. He cursed himself for not bringing some additional light source. The last time he’d been here he’d been riding along in a Medusan body and hadn’t realized just how damned dark and dangerous the path was.

As he’d hoped, the three elders waited for him across the underground river, eying him without suspicion or fear. He stopped and faced them.

The old woman on the right spoke. “So you have come back after all.”

The comment startled him. “You know who I am?”

“Your body is Warden-dead, yet your spirit shines through,” the other woman told him. “Your walk, your manner, your turn of speech is the same.”

“Then you know why I have come.”

“We know,” the first woman responded. “We will not stop anyone from leaving anywhere on this world, but we will not go.”

“They’re going to do it,” he warned. “They’re really going to do it. The kind of heat and thermal radiation they will use will melt the very crust of this planet. I know you understand what that means. No Warden power is going to save you, and the way the Altavar are acting, they can’t save you, either.”

“We know, and yet to go would be to call our lives and beliefs that we have held for so many years a lie,” the man put in. “When they do as you say, we trust in the God of Medusa to save us, or take us, as is Her will. But no matter what happens there, they will unleash upon themselves a power greater than the pitiful Confederacy can conceive, and She will be angry. We place our faith in Her.”

He sighed. “If you want to be martyrs, I can’t stop you. But you have fifty thousand people across this world, and they are your responsibility, too. They can survive, if we know where they are, and if we can get to them some word that we can be trusted.”

“It is impossible to notify them all in the time remaining,” the first woman pointed out, “but surely more than half have knowledge of what is to come. Some will go, and none will be stopped from going. It is the same here.”

“You have explained to the pilgrims here that they are likely to die in two days?”

“We put it to them just that way,” the man assured him. “We told them that physical death was almost a certainty. Only a very few said that they would like to go, and most of them have not changed their minds.”