Jack Chalker - Medusa - A Tiger by the Tail

For Walt Liebscher, the elfish Puck of science fiction for over forty years. Those who haven’t met him or read him have been missing something unique and wonderful.

There is nothing quite like the sensation of calling your worst enemy up for a friendly little chat. The face appeared on the little screen, although such communication often dispensed with visuals. In this case, both sides were curious to see what the other looked like.

He looked at the face on that screen and understood immediately why everyone who had seen it feared it. It was the handsome face of a man in middle age, trim, lean, and somewhat military, but the eyes got you right away. They seemed hollowed, like a skull’s eyes, yet not empty—they burned with an undefinable something that seemed both eerie and impossible.

“Yatek Morah here,” said the man with the strange eyes. “Who are you and why do you demand to speak to me?”

The man on the other end gave a slight smile. He was on a huge floating city in space, a picket ship and base camp for those who guarded the four prison worlds of the Warden Diamond, a third of a light-year out and beyond the range of the Warden’s own peculiar weapons. “I think you know who I am,” he told Morah.

The strange man’s brow furrowed a bit in puzzlement, but, suddenly, he nodded and gave a slight smile of his own. “So the puppet master is finally out in the open.”

“Look who’s talking!”

Morah gave a slight shrug. “So what is it you wish of me?”

“I’m trying to save a minimum of fifty or sixty million lives—including your own,” he told the man with the burning eyes. “Perhaps a great many more than that.”

Morah’s smile widened. “Are you certain that it is we who are in danger? Or, in fact, that anyone is.”

“Let’s not beat around the bush. I know who you are—at least who and what you claim to be. I have been observing your behavior of late, particularly that in the Castle on Charon. You claim to be Chief of Security for our hidden friends here in the Diamond, and I’m willing to accept you at your word—for now. I certainly hope you’re telling the truth.”

Morah sat back and thought a moment. Finally he said, “It appears you know a great deal indeed. How much do you know?”

“I know why your alien friends are there. I know pretty well where they have to be. I know the nature and purpose of the Warden Diamond and its interesting little beasties. And I know for a fact that your’bosses will fight like hell against any move against the Warden Diamond. Furthermore, I know that my bosses will make just such a move when my report is analyzed. What I don’t know is how strong a resistance your bosses can put up; but they are defending a relatively small position against the resources of an enormous interstellar entity, one which, if you are truly Morah, you know well. In the end, things could become horribly bloody for both sides. Perhaps your bosses could get a number of our worlds and your robots will mess up a hundred more—but we’d get the Diamond. And I mean totally. That means that, no matter what we lose, you and your bosses lose more.”

Yatek Morah remained impassive to the logic, but still appeared interested in the overall conversation. “So what do you propose?”

“I think we should talk. By ‘we’ I mean your bosses and mine. I think we’d better reach some accommodation short of total war.”

“Indeed? But if you know so much, my friend, you must also realize that the very existence of this little exercise came about because my bosses, as you call them, in consultation with our people, determined that the Confederacy can never reach an accommodation with another spacefaring race. So well have our little conference, and both sides will say all the right things, and then we’ll sign some sort of treaty or somesuch guaranteeing this or that; but the Confederacy will not honor that any longer than it feels it has to. They will send in their little missionaries, and they will find that they have come across a civilization so alien that they won’t be able to understand it or its motives.”

“Do you?”

Morah shrugged. “I know and accept them, even if I do not completely understand them. I doubt if any human ever will—nor they us. We are the products of two so totally alien histories that I doubt if even an academic acceptance of one another’s motives and attitudes is possible. On an individual basis, perhaps—on a collective basis, never. The Confederacy simply cannot tolerate something that powerful that is also inscrutably different, particularly with a pronounced technological edge. They would attack, and you know it.”

He made no reply to that, because he could find no flaw in the argument. Morah was simply presenting human history from its beginnings. Such was the nature of the beast—as he should know, being human himself. So instead he changed the subject slightly. “Is there another way? I am in something of a trap myself, you know. My bosses are demanding a report. My own computer analyzer had to be, talked into letting me out the door of my lab to come up here and make a call—and it never would have done so if it thought I was going to call you. When I return, I will have a matter of hours, perhaps a couple of days, to make a report. I will be forced to make it. And then the whole thing will be out of my hands. I am running out of time, and that’s why I’m coming to you.”

“What do you want of me?”

“Options,” he told the strange, powerful man. “Solving your little puzzle was simple. Solving the bigger problem is something beyond me.”

Morah seemed deeply impressed. Still, he said, “You realize that I could prevent you from making that report.”

“Possibly,” he agreed. “But it would do no good. The raw data has already been shifted, and they have a Merton impression of me. They could, with some trouble, go through this entire thing again in a very safe area, and come up with the same report. Besides, I doubt if they would believe I died accidentally—so killing me would tip more of your hand.”

“The problems of killing you safely and convincingly are hardly insurmountable, but what you say is true. Doing so would buy very little time. But I’m not certain you do have the total picture. It would be a pity to sacrifice the Warden Diamond, but only a local tragedy. You have failed to consider all the implications of what you have learned. And, it is true, things are iffy should that happen. But there is at least a forty-percent chance that such an outcome would not adversely affect my bosses’ plans and hopes at all. There is more than a ninety-percent chance that it will not completely be a washout from their point of view.”

That disturbed him a bit. “How long would they need for a hundred-percent success rate? In other words, how much time are we talking about?”

“To do things right—decades. A century, perhaps. I know what you’re thinking. Too long. But the alternative will not be the disaster to my people you counted on, only a major inconvenience.”

He nodded glumly. “And if they are—inconvenienced? What sort of price will they exact on the Confederacy?”

“A terrible one. We had hoped from the beginning to avoid any sort of major bloodshed, although, I admit, the prospect of fouling up the Confederacy has great appeal for us. Foul them up, perhaps try and overthrow them from within, yes—but not all-out war. That prospect appeals not at all to the thinking ones among us, and is exciting only to the naive and the totally psychotic.” The frown came back a bit. “I wonder, though, just how much of the truth you really do know.”