Jack Chalker - Cerberus - A Wolf in the Fold

“Overcompensated?”

He nodded. “Sure. The unhappy ones in the motherhood are basically of two kinds—those really unfit for the role, who are usually given psych treatments, and the romantics. Extremely bright and very limited by her assigned role, Dylan had only one view of outside, in this case outside her House—that dock and those adventurous seamen. She fantasized about what she knew and could see, and that really was Hroyasail. But when she did get out and did attain her dreams, they weren’t all they were cracked up to be. The fantasy was far more romantic than the reality. It was either as dull as the motherhood or horribly life-threatening, and when you take risks like that day after day, knowing the odds, even that becomes unsatisfying. Like most people who work on the boats, she was really past caring. The motherhood was dull and repressive, and her fantasy was dull and in its own way equally repressive. So she continued going through the motions without much hope for the future, knowing that sooner or later her luck would run out and she’d be killed. Being killed in her work became her new romantic fantasy.”

I was a bit shocked at this. “You mean she was suicidal?”

He looked back down at his charts. “In a sense, yes. Oh, she wouldn’t try to kill herself, but she herself must have told you that you get to be captain mostly by attrition. Everybody likes thrills, but with the kind of odds in her business you have to have a death wish. It shows tip clearly in her profile.”

I shook my head in wonder. “I can’t believe that of her.”

“Oh, it’s true. What in fact her profile suggests she really wanted was to be what she is—a mother. But a complete mother, one who not only bears but raises her children, frontier-style. In fact, for all her rationalization, the addition of a new factor in her life, when her odds were surely running low, was the final trigger for her to take the action she did.”

“New factor?”

He nodded. “You. She fell in love with you. And suddenly she found it more and more difficult to go out on her daily hunts. For the first time she started getting scared because she no longer was content to die at the helm, so to speak. When you restored her will to live, you shortened her odds of surviving to a tiny fraction. She couldn’t consciously face this, but her subconscious knew, and that’s why she decided to give in—to violate the law—and take the girl Sanda along that day. She was at her peak, of course, because she had both you and Sanda to protect, but you have no idea the risk you took that day. Half of Tier, I’m sure, considered the idea of going down with those she loved, a tidy and romantic ending. She didn’t, because she loved you too much.”

“You’re saying she knew she’d get caught?”

“I’m saying she wanted to get caught. If she hadn’t been caught this time she’d have done something else. She wanted out so she would no longer be faced with inevitable death and separation from you.”

I felt at once touched, uncomfortable, and incredulous. “But she could have quit. We’d have created a place for her with the company.”

“No, no. She couldn’t consciously face that either. I suspect that the idea never entered her head, since she also feared losing you. You admired her courage, even as you feared for her life. She was afraid that any such move would be interpreted as cowardice on your part and might leave her without you—and that was the only thing that mattered to her. You.”

“But that’s ridiculous! I wouldn’t have—”

“You probably wouldn’t,” he agreed, “but the human mind is more than a computer, which is why we have psychiatrists at all. We’re individualists, with emotions and a streak of irrational thinking that both makes us humans great and is our biggest weakness.”

“I still can’t really accept this,” I told him.

“Ah! Love!” he sighed. “Our craziest failing. It has almost been eliminated on the civilized worlds, and it’s pretty damned rare here on Cerberus, too. But give it half a chance, give it a little crack to slip into and it raises its head nonethless. Look, Zhang, I can tell you really don’t like Cerberan culture very much, but next to the frontier the Warden worlds—all of them—allow one thing that makes them, I think, better places. Here we still dream, we still fantasize and romanticize. On the civilized worlds they’ve eradicated that, and they know it. That’s why the frontier’s a continuing operation. It’s the only place where people can still dream. All of humankind’s advances—since the precursor of Man came down from the trees on ancient primordial Earth—have resulted from dreams, fantasies, imagination. Dylan broke free of the motherhood for a dream—she found a way. But as with the civilized worlds, which were begun with the most glorious of dreams in mind, the reality proved less than that Hollow. If you search inside yourself you know it, too.”

I gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “I can see how you wound up here.”

He gave a genuine chuckle in return. “They made a mistake on me. Sent me off to the frontier because they had a shortage of medical officers for a short tour. When I returned to the civilized worlds I couldn’t believe how hollow and empty they were—the same places I loved and yearned for only a year before. I became convinced that civilization as I knew it would continue of its own momentum much as other ancient empires bad continued, but being hollow, it was also fragile. I knew that we’d crack against any good assault from outside, and [started a] campaign to restore some vigor, some mental health.” He spread bis arms. “And here I am. And know what? I really haven’t been that sorry about it.”

“Suit yourself,” I told him. “I certainly see your point, even if I don’t accept your conclusions on the civilized worlds or on Dylan.”

“An interesting metaphor, one that appeals to me. Your wife and our old civilization. History will eventually prove me right on the civilized worlds, but I can prove my point on Dylan easily.”

“How could you do that? From reading psych profiles taken in only one night?”

He grinned like a man about to lower the noose. “No, because I know from your cover application on her what she told you was done to her. I knew in a minute it couldn’t have been like that—that sort of complete turnaround takes weeks, maybe months, if it can be done at all. So I just got the test results on her, and they confirmed my suspicions.”

“Which are?”

“Considering the time, it was a masterful job, as I said, but it was hardly that extensive. Dylan believes they did all of it—she is convinced of that. But what the psychs did was far slighter and more subtle. They simply gave her a nudge here, a tap there, a very subtle working of her subconscious desires, ones she herself was not fully willing to admit to herself. She did the rest to convince herself and you that those things she wanted to do and be were involuntarily imposed from above. Look, Zhang, if we could do such a complete job on somebody like her overnight, the syndicates would put us all through the ringer and you know it.”

“Are you telling me that there’s no psych command that says she has to obey my every wish? No psych plant against going out on the boats?”

“I’m saying there is not. The first, the obedience thing, comes partly from her early training and psyche, partly from inner needs, and partly out of her very real total dependence on you financially. She is convinced there is such a command, but it comes from her own subconscious—and is no less real because it does. Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing preventing her from going near the boats except the laws governing the motherhood, but it’s a damn good way of not having to face up to the fact that she doesn’t want to go any more. You see, she’s taken the things she doesn’t want to face and transferred them to a third party—the psych. That way she can accept it, and that way you have to accept her.”