Jack Chalker - Cerberus - A Wolf in the Fold

Facts About Myself, Some Psych Work, and Fruition

During the waiting period, Dylan began her sessions with Dumonia—and so did I, since convincing her that I loved her no matter what incarnation was at the heart of the whole thing. It was true. I did love her, and if frontier wife was her new goal, then that was fine with me. I wanted her to be happy, and as Dr. Dumonia had noted, under the present circumstances she was not. What was intended was to give her a sense of security— which in its own way was somewhat ironic. I was arranging to kill Wagant Laroo and at the same time trying to make Dylan secure.

What was really interesting about the process was that during a few sessions some of her visions of me and my earlier caper slipped out, as inevitably they would. Although I was paying Dumonia enough to ensure he kept his medical ethics about him, I was more than slightly amused when I discovered that he totally misread this one as another of Dylan’s romantic fantasies in which I had somehow became involved. That computer fraud scheme had been so nutty and unbelievable that even her psych refused to believe it. That, of course, had been precisely why I had done it the way l had.

Naturally, during the process, I had to undergo a bit myself, but I wasn’t really worried. My early training and conditioning automatically switched in under such probes, giving the psychs whatever information I wanted them to have. My probing also wasn’t deep, but was only directed toward my feelings about Dylan and so I was on relatively safe ground. At the end of the second session with the psych and his machines, however, I got one shock.

“Did you know you have two surface-planted command impulses?” He asked me. “Been to a psych before?”

“No,” I answered, slightly worried, “I know of one that should be there. Basic data about Cerberus. It was a, new process they were trying with me to help people get acclimated.”

He nodded. “We got that. Some of it, anyway. Quite thorough. But there’s another.”

I frowned and leaned forward. “Another?”

He nodded. “Actually, as I said, two. Two commands, in addition to the briefing.”

I was beginning to get worried, not only because I didn’t know what these were—all my agent conditioning would be beyond these machines—but also because they might betray me and who I really was. “Do you know what they are?”

“One is treasonous,” he replied, sounding as objective as he did when discussing mundane matters. “It appears to be a command to kill Wagant Laroo if you can. Actually more of a reinforcement—designed to make you detest him enough to kill him. Very nice job, really. I wonder if every new exile is being sent in with this sort of conditioning? Still, I wouldn’t worry about it. The readouts state that you’re really not violent or self-destructive. Though this impulse is enough to ensure that you’re never going to love the state and its glorious leader, it’s no stronger than your common impulses, which would be to damp down the actuality. We’d all like to kill somebody at one time or another, but few of us do. The impulse is no stronger than that. Unless you have a specific pre-Cerberan reason for wanting to do him in? Revenge?”

“No,” I responded smoothly. “Nothing like that. I never met the man, never even heard of him until I was told I was being sent here.”

“All right. But that makes the second one all the more puzzling.”

“Huh?”

“Basically it boils down to an instruction to call your office every so often when the opportunity’s offered you, then forget all about doing so. Do you understand that?”

Instantly I did understand, but the trouble was finding a way to explain it away, all the while mentally kicking myself for not thinking of this before. The sons of bitches! Of course! How could they track me, know what I was doing on Cerberus? The organic transmitter would cease functioning the moment I switched bodies. The answer was simple and staring me in the face, but I’d been too cocky to think of it before.

There were other agents here somewhere. Probably local people, perhaps with something they wanted from outside, or perhaps exiles with close friends, family, something to lose back home. Blackmailable, to a degree. How many times had one of these come to me, perhaps when I was walking alone or on the road, and told me to call the office? Lead me, then, to a transceiver of some sort so I could send my doings up to my other self, sitting there off the Warden system. Done it, then promptly forgot it.

“I think I understand,” I told him. “My—ah, previous activities, well, they involved some complex dealings and some people in high places. These people need certain—codes, basically, to continue to enjoy what I no longer can. This, I think, is a form of blackmail.”

He smiled blandly at me. “You’re a plant, aren’t you? A Confederacy agent. Oh, don’t look startled. You’re not the first, nor the last. Don’t worry, I won’t rat on you. In fact it wouldn’t matter much if I did, all things considered. Your profile indicates you are highly independent, and that Cerberus, and particularly Dylan, has changed you, as something always does. They keep trying though.”

I sat back and sighed. “How did you know?”

“From the start—Qwin Zhang. Woman’s name. Woman’s body, when you came down. But you’re no woman. You’ve never been one, except for that brief and quite brilliant cover entrance. There are differences in the brain scans between males and females. Not ones you’d really notice, but not only am I an expert, I’m also on a world where such swapping goes on all the time, so I see all sorts of switches. Remember the physiological differences between the sexes. The brain governs them, and while new patterns might emerge, there are always traces of the old. Not in your case, though. So from your appearance here, I infer that the Confederacy’s finally figured out how to do what we can do naturally.”

“Not exactly,” I told him. “The attrition rate’s high. But they’re working on it.”

“Fascinating. They’ll have to suppress the knowledge, you know, except perhaps for the leadership and essential people. They’ll have to—such switching would disrupt their society enormously, perhaps beyond repair.” He smiled at the thought. “Well, it’s no big thing, since the Confederacy still has the unsolvable problem. Anybody capable enough to really cause damage as an agent that they send to a Warden world changes into one of the Warden Diamond’s best and most dangerous citizens. Tell me, do you really intend to kill Laroo?”

“I should kill you,” I noted icily. “You’re the most dangerous man on this planet to me. More than Laroo.”

“But you won’t,” he responded confidently. “For one thing, that would add lots of complications to whatever you’re doing now. For another, it would draw attention to you, even if you got away with it, since you’d be linked to me by your scheduled visits. I doubt if a man like you could stand being under a microscope right now. And finally, I think you realize that I couldn’t care less if you bump off Laroo, or settle down and enjoy life, or take over the whole damned place. If you did, it’d be a change, anyway. You must believe me, Zhang, when I tell you that you’re the seventh agent I’ve met and I haven’t turned one in yet. You surely must realize by now that my own fatal psychological flaw is that I’m a romantic revolutionary anarchist with no guts, but with a taste for the good life. If you weren’t sure I would stay bought, you wouldn’t have come to me in the first place.”