Jack Chalker - Cerberus - A Wolf in the Fold

“You can can the act, Otah,” I responded, a slight edge in my voice. “I know about the transmissions. I know you get your black-market electronics from the Confederacy somehow in exchange for triggering folks like me.”

He laughed nervously. “Why, Qwinl That’s insane!”

“No, it’s true—and you know it, I know it, even Dylan knows it. Otah, this has grown bigger than you, bigger than the bootleg stuff. I need to call in. I need to call in now, consciously, and with full knowledge and memory of the call. You understand?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about!”

“No more games!” I snapped, “If you want to keep this sham up, fine. There are other sources. But you’ll be long gone to Momrath for inconveniencing me, I promise you. Otah, I’m in the middle of Wagant Laroo’s own circle, including the man himself. One word about your off-planet bootlegging activities and you know what will happen.”

He sputtered and swallowed hard. “You wouldn’t.”

“In a minute. Now, let’s stop this old school uniform stuff, huh? We got to be friends because that was how you got your payoffs. You used me, and that means I can now use you—or discard you. Which will it be?”

He swallowed hard, shook his head, and sighed. “Come on, it was nothing personal, Qwin. You gotta believe that. I always liked you. It was just—well, business.”

“The transceiver, Otah. Let’s get this over with. I can only promise you that if you go along, with no funny business, no one will ever know. But we’re stuck for time. We’re being followed, and I had to get a doctor to remove a couple of small tracking devices placed under our skins without our knowledge. We’re going on a real shopping spree and celebration today, hitting all our old haunts, and you’re one. But if we take too long here, they’ll know.”

He looked around nervously. “Come on in the back, he turned and we followed.

The workshop was the usual mess, out of which he dug a helmetlike device and plugged it into what looked like a test bench console, then turned on the juice.

“Looks something like the brain-scan things—the big stuff,” Dylan noted, and I nodded.

“It probably is something like that. Otah, without saying the magic words, how’s it work?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. The transmission just goes out through the antenna on the roof I use for routine communications. I guess it’s scrambled and picked up somewhere else on Cerberus, then beamed to satellite, and then to who knows where. All I know is you come in, we talk, I wait until we’re alone and say—well, the key words—and you and I walk back, turn the thing on, plug it in. Then you put it on and go into a trance for a couple of minutes. Afterwards you take it off and come back out, and I spot you and make some inane comment and you pick up the conversation from there, just as if you never left.”

I nodded. “Okay, good. Go on back out to the shop until I need you. Dylan can stand watch.”

“Suits me,” he responded nervously, and left.

I looked over the helmet. “It’s a simplified version of a readout used by the Security Clinic,” I told her. “It is something like a scan device, only it transmits the information.”

“I thought that was impossible,” she responded. “Nobody but you would be able to receive it.”

“That’s pretty much correct. Now, don’t get alarmed if I go into that trance. Just let it go. Make a brief appearance out front if you want to—I want no interruptions. When I’m through, we’ll see what’s what.”

“Qwin, who’s on the other end of that thing?”

I sighed. “A computer, probably. Quasi-organic type. And eventually me.”

And so that’s where we stand to date. I hope you will evaluate this information and pass it on to the Operator at this point, rather than waiting for a final report which I will make—if I’m able.

There is a mild pause, like a break in the static. Suddenly a voice—no, not a voice, really, just an impression of one, forms in my mind.

“I will inform him that the report should be read,” the computer says, “but not of its incomplete nature. He will make his own decision.”

“Fair enough,” I tell the computer. “How long?”

“Unknown. He is distraught over the Lilith report and has refused immediate reading of this one. Perhaps a day.”

“How, then, will I get bach into contact? I can’t draw attention to here.”

“We will contact you. Do not worry.”

That’s easy for you to say. You’re only a machine, and you aren’t down here with your neck in a noose.

END TRANSMISSION. READ OUT, HOLD FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

The observer removed the helmet and sank back in the chair, looking and feeling exhausted. He just sat there for several minutes staring at nothing, as if unable to focus his thoughts or get hold of himself.

“You are upset again,” the computer said.

He pointed at nothing. “Is that me down there? Is that really me? Is that me so romantically linked, so crazy and so ambitious?”

“It is you. The verifications and patterns show it so.”

He chuckled dryly. “Yeah. Quantitative analysis. Boil everything down to nice, neat little numbers and symbols. It must be nice to be a computer, not to give a damn that everything you ever thought, ever believed, about yourself and your society is being ripped apart bit by bit, piece by piece.”

“Both of us are the sum of our respective programming,” the computer noted. “Nothing more—or less.”

“Programming! Aw, what’s the use? You’re incapable of understanding this. I wonder if anybody is. Nobody’s ever been put through this before—and shouldn’t be, again.”

“Nonetheless, we have learned much. If the Cerberan unit were to be terminated right now, we would be far ahead. We know now how the robots are programmed. We know that the point of contact between alien and Diamond is inside the orbit of the moons of Momrath. We also are in a position to strike a blow against those robots, even if we have not yet solved the puzzle.”

“I’m not going to recommend frying Cerberus!” he snapped. “Not now, anyway.”

“The station and Laroo’s Island would be sufficient, don’t you think, to put more of a crimp in the operation than even killing one of the Lords, or even all four?”

“Yeah, you may be right. But if I report this, they’re going to recommend taking the whole planet out anyway. As Laroo, I think, pointed out, that might provoke a confrontation—and it would eliminate the robot threat. Without Cerberus, they couldn’t program the things with real minds.”

“Why do you hesitate? Ordinarily you would think nothing of such a step.”

“Why—” He paused, sitting back down. “Yeah, why do I?” he asked himself aloud. “What’s it to me?” That was his training and experience talking, but that was only his intellectual side. There was another side of him, one he had never suspected, that had now revealed itself not once but twice. With Lilith he’d finally convinced himself that it had been an aberration. He was a technological agent, and in a nontechnological society he’d had to change and compromise. But Cerberus? The excuse was gone in that situation. And yet, and yet—had only his twins down there changed?

Still, there was only one thing to do, and he knew it.

“If it makes your decision any easier,” the computer put in, “the elimination of Cerberus would not stop the robot operation, only set it back. As long as any of the Cerberan variant of the Warden organism remained in alien hands it could be used anywhere in-system. We had the indication that it already was being so used. Nor is it yet the time to provoke a confrontation. We have insufficient data yet to get such a resolution through Council for the sector’s elimination. All we might accomplish at this point is a refusal to defend by the enemy, the elimination of the Warden system or its neutralization, and we would then lose all links with the enemy.”