Jack Chalker - Cerberus - A Wolf in the Fold

“But you talked yourself out of his traps,” she pointed out, “and he went along with you. If he’s that good, why did he?”

“I think I know. Consider his position. His biggest weakness is his fear that at any moment his enormous and growing power may be snuffed out. It was already a fear before, but now that one of the Four Lords is gone, it has become an obsession. He has the best minds on Cerberus working on his ultimate solution—including Merton, who may be one of the best minds in that area, period. And they can’t crack it. He needs Project Phoenix. So even figuring on a double-cross of some kind, he’s willing to let me go ahead anyway. He has no choice. The only thing he can do is let me go all the way, using Merton and the others to uncover my tricks, in the hopes that I’ll still solve the problem for him. It’s the ultimate challenge, Dylan. He’s betting his ego against mine that he can outfox me before I can outfox him.”

“You’re sure he knows you’re planning something?”

I nodded. “He knows. Like Bogen said, you get a gut feeling, pro to pro. Like the gut feelings you relied on most heavily in the bork hunts. He knows simply because of the bottom line. Once I deliver, he has everything to fear from me and nothing to gain by keeping me around. We both understand that. He knows I’ll have to pull something, and he is betting he can figure it out. That’s why the free leash right now, the giving in to my conditions. It doesn’t matter—as long as I deliver the goods.”

She looked at me. “ Can you deliver?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t the slightest idea. That’ll be up to Otah and my brother and Krega and those above him. In the end, I have to bet on their being able to come up with the solution to the problem.”

She just nodded and turned and looked back out the window of the helicab.

Soon we arrived at Dumonia’s offices and were quickly ushered in. Laroo had wasted no time in setting all this up, since he saw assassins in every corner. He was probably right.

Dumonia, too, seemed impressed. While Dylan was off with the thirteen judges assembled on Laroo’s orders just for this purpose, we sat, relaxed, and talked. I liked Dumonia, although I didn’t trust him.

“Well, so you blew the lid off your cover,” he noted casually.

I nodded. “Why not? It was always shaky anyway. And frankly, if you knew, it’d eventually get out in any event.”

He winced. “Am I that disreputable?”

“For all I know, you’re exactly what you seem to be. Or you could be Wagant Laroo himself. On this world, who can tell?”

He found the idea amusing. “That’s the most common problem we face, you know, here on Cerberus. Paranoia. Fear of who’s who. It’s the thing that keeps the people in line. We have a really nasty element in our population, courtesy of the Confederacy, but it takes something like that to keep us as peaceful and relatively crime-free as we are. That and the threat of a judgment, or death, if caught. I suspect that that’s why I love this place so much. Think of the business!”

I had thought a lot about Svarc Dumonia over the past several weeks, and had been extra careful even in choosing him. The man was a total contradiction—a totally amoral, cynical person with criminal tendencies in the mass and abstract sense, yet totally devoted to helping and curing his individual patients.

“Just your idea that I might be Laroo is a good example,” he said. “Total paranoia reigns. But I’m not Laroo. I couldn’t ever be Laroo, for the very simple reason that I hate governments. I hate all institutions, from the Confederacy to the Cerberan government to the local medical society. Organized anthills, all of ’em. Designed to stifle and straitjacket the individual human spirit, and doing a damned good job as well. Religions are just as bad, maybe worse. Dogma. You have to believe this; you have to behave like that. Run around wasting time in silly rituals instead of being productive. You know we have a hundred and seventy different faiths in Medlam alone? Everything from the Catholic Church and Orthodox Judaism—consider the problems with sex changing, circumcision, and the rest they face in our changeable world—to local nut cults that believe the gods are sleeping inside Cerberus and will awaken to take us to the Millennium someday.”

“You’re an anarchist, then.”

“Oh, I suppose. A comfortable, upper-class anarchist, a sort, wearing tailored suits and having a seaside resort home I can get to in my private flier. That’s where the old philosophers went wrong, you know. Anarchism isn’t the way for the masses. Hell, they want to be led, or they wouldn’t keep tolerating and creating all these new bureaucratic institutions to tell them what to think. It’s an individual philosophy. You compromise, becoming as much of an anarchist as you can without worrying about man in the collective. The only thing you can do in the collective sense is to shake them up periodically, give ’em a revolutionary kick in the pants. It never lasts—it creates its own dogmas and bureaucracies. But theshake-up is healthy. When the Confederacy got so institutionalized that even a little revolt here and there was impossible, that’s when dry rot set in.”

I began to see where he was heading. “And you think I’m a local revolutionary?”

“Oh, you’ll probably get your fool head blown off, but maybe you’ll give ’em a kick. Eventually you’ll become what you destroy even if you succeed, but then some new smart ass will come along and do the same to you. It’ll keep the juices flowing for the long run.”

I accepted that. I liked Dumonia, although not necessarily all that he said or believed. I certainly couldn’t see myself as another Laroo and said so.

“But you are,” he responded. “You told me you felt real apprehension and fear when you met him. Know why? Because you looked at Laroo and knew, deep down, that you were looking at yourself. Knew that you were looking straight into the eyes of somebody whose mind worked just like yours.”

“I don’t worship power.”

“Because you’ve never had that degree of power, so you can’t really imagine what it might do to you. But you do love it. Every time you took on an opponent, a system, something, and won, you exercised power and demonstrated your mastery over those people, that system.”

“I hope not. I sincerely hope you’re wrong. But tell you what. In the incredibly unlikely event that I ever get to be Lord of Cerberus, I’ll continue to see you often just to have you kick me in the rear. How’s that?”

He didn’t laugh. “No, you won’t. You won’t like, or will choose not to believe, what I tell you, and you’ll eventually grow sick of it. I know. You see, twenty years ago I had almost this identical conversation with Wagant Laroo.”

“What!”

He nodded. “I’ve seen ’em come and go. I helped put him in, and I’ll help put you in if I can, but nothing will change.”

“How do you stay alive, Doc?”

He grinned. “My little secret. But remember, everybody now running this place has at one time or another been a patient of mine.”

“Including me,” I muttered, more to myself than him. I suddenly realized that here in this office was truly the smartest, most devious man on Cerberus—and oddly, not one to be feared, at least yet. Dumonia could have been Lord any time he wanted, but he didn’t want it. Running a place was against his religion.

“Well, let’s get on to more direct matters,” I suggested, feeling more and more uncomfortable. “You said that if Dylan were out of judgment you might effect a complete cure. Well, that’s going to be the case. Now, what needs to be done?”