Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

Confederacy’s system and dreams. That must have been why I felt so uncomfortable with it.

I rose to my feet. “Let’s get walking. They’ll have foot patrols through here anytime now, and we’ve already stayed too long. Let’s make all the time at night we can. We can talk on the way.”

They did send a few patrols and copters after us, and we saw or heard them from time to time, but they made no more than a minimum effort, which simply wasn’t good enough. To their minds, being out in the wild was tantamount to being dead anyway, and nobody was really worth the kind of effort that would have been needed to track us down. Again it was Medusa’s own system that allowed us our freedom, although what sort of freedom remained to be seen.

The biology texts hadn’t revealed the half of Medusa’s natural history, though. Not only were there hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different plants large and small, but the forests literally teemed with animal life. All of it was strange-looking on the surface, but at the same time very much like many other planets. Perhaps the theory that ecosystems developed under nearly identical conditions came out much the same way was true. Here, as elsewhere, trees were clearly trees and insects clearly bugs—and they served the same functions.

The first real concern wasn’t eluding a ho-hum pursuit, but finding food. Coming into spring in the “tropical” regions meant that there were a number of berries and fruits around, but little looked ripe and all was unknown to me.

“How do we know what’s safe and what’s not?” Angi complained, hungry like the rest of us.

“I think it’s simple,” I told them all. “At least, it should be. If there’s anything really lethal around it should produce some kind of warning that our Wardens will trigger. That berry, there, for example, smells really foul, and I wouldn’t touch it. Even my initial indoctrination, though, said that we could eat almost anything, with the Wardens converting the substance into what we and they really need. I’d say, for now, we just pick something that at least seems practical to eat and eat it.”

It took some time, though, and a lot of guts, before we decided to go through with a test. The leaves and unripe fruits tasted from bitter to lousy, but once we started eating we found it difficult to stop until we felt full. All of us suffered a bit from stomach aches and the runs that night but after a somewhat fitful sleep on the open ground we all awoke feeling much better. After that our Wardens adjusted even more to our new situation and provided the guidance we needed—much as I’d hoped. Some stuff that tasted lousy the first time tended to taste quite good after that, while other stuff just tasted worse and worse. With that neat sorting and classification system to go on, we had no more trouble, although I confess that Ching wasn’t the only one who dreamed of good meat and fresh fruit.

Well, we wouldn’t starve, so the next thing was to adapt our lifestyle to this new environment. Clothing proved unnecessary, as always, and after what we’d been through modesty was no longer a factor. Shelter from the cold rains and occasional i6e-pellet storms was provided by the forests and, if necessary, we could rig portable lean-tos from branches and the broad leaves of a prevalent bush. In point of fact I had the survival training and the means to make permanent dwellings, if necessary, but I had no intention of founding a village at this point. We had three months before the first snows, with the best weather yet to come, to find the Wild Ones. That had to be our first priority.

Over several days I made a broad circle around Rochande and then headed toward the coast which that handy map in my head said was there. From that point, and using the sun for direction, I could determine our approximate location and chart where we were going.

The first few weeks were education weeks. We learned what we could eat, where it was most likely to grow, and what caused problems. I gave a small seminar in survival skills—building lean-tos, that sort of thing—and we also learned the habits of many of the animals. The tree-dwelling tubros were all around, but if you didn’t bother them they wouldn’t bother you. The vettas stayed mostly in the clearings and on the plains, so we tended to avoid such places. We had not met a harrar as yet, and I, for one, had no intention of doing so if I could help it.

Then there were the occasional thermal areas. The place wasn’t full of them, but they were far more numerous than I originally would have guessed. Geyser holes, bubbling mudpots, and fumeroles turned up in the damnedest places and, occasionally, we even came across a hot thermal pool. Once you got used to the sulfurous stink, these pools were very handy for bathing. We even tried some experiments in wrapping all sorts of food in leaf bags and boiling them.

We also got to know one another better than I think any of us had ever known anyone before. I will say this for all three of them—they were inwardly tough. Though complaints were numerous they had by and large accepted their lot fatalistically and began to look upon this new life as some sort of great adventure. I wondered, though, if they would have fared so confidently or so well had I not been there to teach them a few tricks of the trade.

There was no more purpose in concealment, and I explained to them just who and what I was. In a sense the explanation seemed to reassure them, and the fact that I was a professional agent somehow seemed to soften Ching’s initial revulsion at my killings. It became less of a radical change in me than a reversion to form, and she seemed better able to accept that.

We lapsed into a total familiarity so easily I often wondered if the Wardens had anything to do with it. Morphy became “just Bura,” Ching was still Ching, and Angi’s last name I just about forgot. As for me, I accepted everybody calling me by Ching’s pet name for me—Tari—and we became just one big family.

The fifty-five who remained behind continued to weigh heavily on me, though, and I decided to find out why they stayed and these didn’t.

Bura, it seemed, was a native but had once been much higher in the Guild. Years earlier she had married into a family group that included another exile to the Diamond, a rough-and-tumble man built like an ox who had a horrible temper with those outside his own family group but was kind and gentle at home. Still, she admired his independent spirit, his disdain for TMS and the system, and, I suspect, she damn near worshiped him. One day he had one too many run-ins with TMS, of course, and he’d blown up and literally snapped a monitor in two. Most of the family, to save their own skins, were willing to testify against him as to his murderous instincts and to his inability to “assimilate” into Medusan society. Bura refused, for which she was transferred halfway around the world and demoted to a passenger-service shift supervisor with no hope of advancing any further. At that she’d gotten off lucky, but when the psych she was sent to by TMS for adjustment instead introduced her to the Opposition, she was more than ready and willing and quickly rose to cell leader—Sister 657, of course.

Angi had a less understandable background. Born and raised on Medusa, and never to her knowledge having had any contact with Diamond transportees, she nonetheless, was always somebody who didn’t quite fit. As a kid she’d beaten the bus fares and done some minor shoplifting—for which she was never caught—and she’d qualified for training as a civil engineer. The subject fascinated her, but the restrictions, the lack of creativity, the sheer sameness imposed from above, had always gotten to her, so she’d never progressed very far. When you built just one way, and all of the tough problems had already been solved, it was a pretty dull profession. She’d been doing quality-control supervision for a massive repair of the bus system in a sector of Rochande—“real thrilling work,” she called it without enthusiasm. Again it was a routine psych exam that introduced her to the Opposition, and she joined simply because it was another something different to do. She had been the one who had pushed the armed monitor over the rail—“strictly on impulse,” she told us.

None knew the other courageous woman, the one who had led us out of the city only to be denied freedom and life herself, but all of us agreed that, no matter where—or whether—she was at the moment, she was and would always be a member of our family.

Family is exactly what we became in those early days of Medusa’s spring. On a world whose culture was based upon the group marriage, there was no real jealousy or bad feelings between any of the women, and certainly not from me. In fact, this period of isolation, just the four of us living much as man’s ancestors must have lived back on the ancient home world of man a million years ago, was in many respects the best time of my entire life. It was during this period that, I think, I turned my back once and for all on the Confederacy.

We made our way in zigzag fashion from coast to interior thermal areas and back again, developing a sense of where the thermal regions were. We headed north because Bura’s long tenure on the trains had shown her that some Wild Ones definitely lived between Rochande and Gray Basin. She had caught glimpses of manlike shapes in the distance several times—in the direction of the coast. Occasionally we would find traces of habitation, signs of a temporary encampment, but there seemed no way at all to tell how warm or cold the trail.

Ultimately we never found them—they found us. Exactly how long we were alone in our wandering tribal existence I don’t know, but summer was definitely upon us when, one day, stepping into a clearing, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by several new people.