Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

everybody’s as amateurish as these people, you have no real problem, only an irritant. So what if they can play games with the system as long as they’re still trapped in it? But if, at the top levels, there’s somebody or some group really able to use what they’ve got, then I want to meet them.”

She looked at me with those steely eyes. “Why?”

I grinned. “Because I want your job. Because, maybe, I’d like to be First Minister before I’m forty. Or, maybe, the guy who tells the First Minister what to do.”

“Ambitious, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. “I’m young.”

CHAPTER SEVEN Working Both Sides of the Street

The psych job was no big problem. In fact, the hardest thing about it was not betraying how much more I knew about the tech’s machines than she did. Still, as someone allegedly under psych probes for over a year after the murder, I could be expected to have a certain amount of familiarity and expertise.

The routine psych exam was designed to catch problems before they developed into something that might cause real trouble for the Guild and the system. I did learn, by casual conversation while taking the exam, a bit of interesting additional information to file.

There was no psych school on Medusa; all psychs native to the Warden system were trained on Cerberus. It stood to reason, therefore, that this Opposition might also have Cerberan origins. I had no evidence, of course, but such a level of technological expertise combined with such an amateurish and naive set of people led to the inescapable conclusion that we—the Opposition, that is—were the arm of a widespread, Confederacy-backed underground whose main objective, at least on Medusa, was to get organized and remain in waiting until needed.

I got along well with the cell members, particularly once I disdained that silly robe, hood, and veil the rest of them used. Hell, they all knew who I was anyway, so why fool with that sort of stuff? To my disappointment, most of them were also in the Transport Guild—I wanted to broaden my base—although at least two were fairly high up. But they were such eager amateurs, that I felt I had to more or less lead them along and also maybe dangle some bait for the higher-ups. Therefore, at one meeting I dropped a real bombshell. They were doing their usual debating-society stuff about the problems in breaking the system as opposed to crawling around in the cracks when I interrupted. “I think I’m pretty clear on how to destroy totally TMS’s hold on Medusa.” All of a sudden you could have heard a pin drop.

“So? What master plot has the superkid come up with now?” one of them finally asked.

“Let me tell you about the harrar,” I began. “They’re too big not to eat all the time, and too big and fat ever to catch anything. Yet there are plenty of harrar in the wild. You remember some of the old wives’ tales about them?”

They nodded and shook their heads and mumbled and finally somebody said, “But nobody believes that crap.”

“On a world that’s been settled for this short a time, there’s almost always a good reason for those tales,” I pointed out. “And the harrar itself fits in perfectly. They can change shape. They can make themselves look like other, more familiar things and then just sit there until prey comes near. Maybe they even attract it. But they change shape all the same. On a more primitive basis, I think the tubros have a little of this ability as well. They have a tail that looks like their necks with a ball of fat on the end of it. Why? A neck with no head, or a ball of fat, isn’t going to fool any predator worth its. salt. I think they make that ball of fat look just like their pointy heads, when they have to. All of them change color to fit their background, as do almost all the animals on Medusa. Hell, even we do that, sort of.”

“But that’s animals,” somebody noted. “What’s that to do with us, even if it is true?”

“I think humans can do it, too. The fact is, the Warden cells that make-up our bodies are basic living cells for plants and animals. They’re not like normal human, plant, or animal cells, but they’re more like each other than like normal cells. They protect us from cold and heat and even from starvation, within limits. Given air and water we can live anywhere and on most anything if we had to. Nature is really pretty consistent. Shape-changing is simply a practical survival characteristic the Wardens could develop.”

“Then why can’t we do it?” somebody wanted to know.

“Because we don’t know how. I suspect that if we were out in the wild the ability would come more or less naturally. But it does exist, even here. I’ve seen scars heal almost while I was watching them. I’ve seen three people I knew change sex so absolutely you’d swear they were born with that new sex. If we can accomplish something that total, we can surely make changes with any face and form.”

“That may be,” Sister 657 put in, “but nobody can control these things so it does no one any good.”

“I think they can be controlled. I think the harrar and the tubros’ tail tell us it’s possible. With them it’s probably instinctive, but the ability is there. It’s only a matter of our finding out how to do it. I’m convinced the government knows. They went to a lot of trouble to suppress any idea that it’s possible because they know it is. Their system is one based on visual and audio surveillance. Anybody who looked and sounded just like somebody else could use the card of whoever they appeared to be. Replace somebody—almost anybody roughly your size—and you can walk where he or she would walk and the monitors would never pick up the substitution. A lot of TMS’s offices, for example, have no monitors themselves. The watchers don’t like to be watched, and they need a few places off the record sometimes. A relatively small group of malleable people could walk into TMS as prisoners and wind up replacing everybody in top authority. A coordinated effort could collapse the system beyond easy repair.”

“He makes it sound so easy,” our other male member grumbled.

“No, it’s not easy, and the plan is not without risk. Some people would die. A lot of homework would be necessary to keep detection away as long as possible. But our group has enough people placed in top levels to phony those records now—they’re using the same principle I’m referring to, only in a more limited way. They understand that a totalitarian government is dependent on its technology for its controls and is secure only as long as that technology works and remains in their hands. They’re going slightly nuts just because we beat the system, even though we haven’t done anything threatening to them. Take away their system’s confidence in knowing that the person on their recordings is really that person and you have rabid, absolute paranoia and fear on the part of the leadership. Shake it and it topples. It’s more fragile than you’ve been brought up to think.”

This set off a furious debate that was ended by Sister 657 with the comment, “All this might be true—if such body control is really possible. And that’s a big if.”

“I’m not so sure it is,” I replied. “Look, we’re pretty low down on the Opposition chart right now, but somebody up top is very bright and very well placed. If we can get this idea kicked far enough upstairs we might find out for sure. Can you arrange it?”

“I’ll try,” she assured me, “but I still think it’s nothing but a fairy tale.”

I had been on Medusa for more than six months when I finally got an answer. I’ll say this for them—whoever was at the top was cautious in the extreme. The information, when it came, was both good and bad at the same time, and not something that could be used immediately.

Yes, all humans on Medusa were potentially malleable, but in order to accomplish a change, you first almost literally had to develop a sense of the Wardens and their connections, one to another. Once you had this sense— this ability to “talk” to your Wardens—you could, through hypnosis or psych machine, perform what was needed to be performed. The trouble was, nobody had ever found out how you accomplished it. Oh, it was possible, and had been done, but those who could do it could not explain how they did it, or even accurately describe the sensation. Nor had they been able to teach others. And unless you had that “sense of communication,” as they called it, all the hypnos and psych machines in the world couldn’t do a damned thing.

There was a general feeling that people who had the ability were born with it, at least as a latent ability that could not be learned. The government spent some time looking for those people, spiriting them away to a special compound far from anything and anybody else. They had hoped to breed the ability, but that plan had fallen flat. There were reports that many of the Wild Ones could do it, and often did, but whether