Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

That seemed a fair trade, but I decided some hesitation was in order. “We go eat—like this?”

She laughed. “You really are hung up, aren’t you? They’ll have a psych on you if you don’t relax a little.” She turned and waved at the room. “Besides, somebody’s always looking at you anyway. What’s the difference?”

She had a point there. I let her pick up the clothes bag and followed her out the door, then stopped. “Hey— what about the cards?”

Obviously I had said something funny again. “You don’t need cards in your own home,” she responded as she headed for the stairs.

She was certainly right about nudity. Old, young, male, female—everyone walked about and sat and talked with no inhibitions at all. Here and there would be people in uniform, either somebody with rank who wanted everybody else to remember it or those still coming in from work or leaving for it. Apparently there were staggered start times for the shifts within the two-hour active period, probably to ease the mass-transit load.

The cafeteria was about half full, with the usual eating-place bustle and unintelligible mass-conversation buzz. There were no menu choices, I found—you went up, punched a button, got a covered tray, then went to a table and sat down. Water and a selection of three beverages at a self-service area in the center of the cafeteria provided the only option.

The food was unfamiliar but tasted pretty good. I was never very fussy about food and was certainly no gourmet, so I adjusted to this as easily as if I’d eaten the stuff all my life. After the jail mush and blocky slop of the reception center it was a real pleasure to have a recognizable plate with entree, vegetables, and dessert. The meat seemed a standard synthetic, but the fruit and vegetable appeared fresh. I remembered that Medusa imported a fair amount of food from the warmer worlds category. Keep the masses happy, I thought, even if they can eat tree bark.

I was struck by a number of things as I sat there eating, including at least one. fact that amazed me. Here were these people in the most totalitarian society I’d ever known or experienced, and they were sitting back, relaxed, talking, looking, and sounding for all the world like any cafeteria crowd anyplace—except, of course, for then: bare hides. Far from making me relax more about Medusa, the observation that here was a totalitarian society that worked—worked so well that the generations born and raised into it felt completely at ease—made me nervous. I had to admit that Talant Ypsir might be an unpleasant individual, but he was damned smart.

My other observations were on the more practical side. Medusans looked about as human as anybody else, particularly a frontier world population. Yet subtle differences that might otherwise go unnoticed were immediately apparent to an Outsider such as myself. The skin textures seemed far more leathery, somehow; the hair was also far stiffer, wiry.,Even the eyes seemed somehow different, almost as if shaped by a master sculptor out of marble, without the shine and liquidity of human eyes.

I knew that I, too, now shared these characteristics, yet I felt perfectly normal, not in the least bit changed. My skin had the same look as the skin of those around me, yet it felt normal, soft, and natural to me.

A third observation was that I was the youngest-looking person in the cafeteria, although several very young people were there. Well, nothing to do but get to know my roommate a bit more. She certainly seemed anxious to get to know me.

“How old are you?” she asked. “They told me you were young, but I figured you’d be my age.”

My eyebrows rose. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen two weeks ago,” she told me proudly. “That’s when I started work here.”

“Well, I’m close to fifteen,” I answered her initial question, stretching the truth a bit. There’s far less of a gap between fifteen and sixteen than between fourteen and sixteen. I wanted to press a bit further on her comment, though. “Who told you about me? And how come you and me are together here?”

She sighed. “They really didn’t tell you anything, did they? Okay, three weeks ago I was just graduated and still in Huang Bay—that’s way south of here—with my family. I knew I was going to get assigned soon, though, and, sure enough, my orders came through. I was inducted into the Transport Guild and sent here to start work. About a week ago I was called down to the Supervisor’s office and told that I was being paired with one Tarin Bul, a young man sent here from Outside, and that the two of us would work as a pair thereafter. They also told me you’d have some ideas and ways I might find strange—and that’s certainly true. In fact, all this is still a little strange to me, although it’s the same kind of setup I grew up in. My assignment’s inside, though, and away from the water.”

“Huang Bay’s on the equator, then?” I knew where it was exactly thanks to the handy map in my head, but it was a logical question.

She nodded. “Nearly, anyway. It’s a lot prettier than here, with all sorts of flowers and trees. Not that this is really bad, though. No animal or insect problems, and the fruit’s fresher.” She paused a moment. “Still, I kind of miss home and family and all that.”

I understood perfectly. Although I’d never been raised in any sort of family atmosphere, or had any close personal attachments, I could well see how someone who had been would be very lonely and homesick in this situation. That she accepted the wrench in her life so unquestioningly, said something important about the society. That wrench also explained why she was glad to see me.

We put our trays in the disposal, dropped the laundry by the small window that now had a uniformed attendant, then went back upstairs. We would see the rest of the place later; now it was time to get to know each other better, and for me to start learning the rules.

Apparently once the door was activated by a card the first time it opened when it recognized you, because the room door slid back and we walked in. First Ching checked the room terminal, then, finding it still blank, sank back down on the bed and looked at me. It was far too soon for me to do anything but sit on the other. I didn’t wait for an opening, though.

“You said downstairs that we were paired—does that mean what I think it does?” I asked her.

“Depends on what you think it means. Everybody’s paired who hasn’t started or joined a family group. From here on in, we do everything together. Eat, sleep, go out, work—even our cards have identical account codes, so we can spend each other’s money.”

I gave a wan smile. “What if we don’t get along?”

“Oh, we will. The State ran us through a lot of checks with their big computers and came up with us. The State doesn’t make mistakes.”

I certainly hoped that wasn’t true; frankly, I knew it wasn’t. But what the hell. “That might be true for native-born Medusans, but they can’t know as much about me as they do about somebody born and raised here.” And how! At least—I hoped not.

She seemed upset. “You mean you don’t like me?”

“Now, J didn’t say that. I think I could learn to like you a lot, but I don’t really know you yet, and you don’t know me. And I don’t know Medusa at all—which should be obvious.”

My seeming honesty calmed her a little. “I guess you’re right. But there’s so little to know about Medusa.”

“That’s only because you were born and raised here. What you take for granted I don’t recognize at all. This pairing, for example—is it always a girl and a boy?”

My question got her giggling a bit again. “That’s silly. You put any two in a pair and one of ’em’s gonna be a girl.”

“How’s that?” Now I was genuinely confused. There was something here I was missing, and it was tough to find.

She sighed and tried to summon patience without sounding patronizing, but she didn’t quite make it. “I still don’t see what your problem is. I mean, I was a boy once myself and it was no big thing.”

“What!” But with my surprise came the dawn, and with a lot more gingerly asked half-questions I managed to find the key. The key was the basic Warden precept on Medusa: survival.

Unlike the rest of the Warden Diamond, on Medusa the Warden organism was not all-pervasive. It depended upon the living creatures, plant and animal, of Medusa for its survival. On places like Lilith and Charon the little buggers were in the rocks and trees and everything, but here they concentrated only on animal life forms—and they changed those life forms to insure their own survival. That meant Wardens couldn’t reproduce beyond their host’s capacity without deforming that host and making the host less likely to survive in general. Thus, there was a