Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

four different worlds with the other forms either eliminated or reduced to minor and static roles. Frankly, the whole thing smells more like some sort of experiment than any chance occurrence—which form is best for what, perhaps. To accept current biology on all four worlds is beyond my credulity range.

Point 2: All of the flora and fauna on all four worlds logically match with our carbon-based life system, and all are integrated in biologically expected and balanced ways, except for the omnipresent Warden organism, which is unique unto itself. Here is a totally different kind of life that has no microbial relatives yet is static enough that its properties and behavior on each world is uniform and predictable. §uch an organism might be expected to mutate with lightning speed—after all, this is the common theory applied to the three worlds other than Lilith, that we spread the organism and it instantly mutated to meet the differing conditions. So I am asked to accept an organism that mutates instantly and perfectly to other planets, yet shows not the slightest sign of mutation or deviation on any of the four themselves. I find this biologically inconceivable. Therefore, I am forced to the conclusion that the Warden organism is an artificially created form of life superimposed on all four worlds by a common intelligence.

The Warden organism is far too simple a creature to do more than cause an illness or two, yet it is integral to all four worlds and symbiotically matched to them. On Lilith the Warden organism obviously serves as a sort of planetary manager, keeping the ecosystem stable and static; this is what led to the prevailing view of a single source. I submit that evidence exists in ample amounts that the organism is equally the planetary manager of the other three worlds, and that a little hard research will show this to be so. We drew our original conclusions about the Warden organism because of its widely variable effects on humans and human perception and ability. But the Warden organism was not created and does not exist with humans in mind at all—it is there to keep the ecosystems of the four worlds within certain stable tolerances—in effect, to eliminate as many variables as possible.

Charon and Medusa further demonstrate that the Warden organism, while chemically rather simple, has the ability to act collectively and to draw upon a vast amount of complex knowledge. This is less obvious on Cerberus and Lilith, but I can cite examples there as well, and I need only note how fast it is able to regenerate damaged and lost tissue in humans on all four worlds. But how is it able to draw upon and use such knowledge?

At first I was drawn to the hypothesis of a collective intelligence for the organism—that is, each colony represented a cell or collection of cells in communication with other colonies, or cells, making up a single and physically discorporeal entity. I find no evidence to support this supposition, though, and much to support the conclusion that this is not true. People of Charon travel to Medusa, and vice versa, with no ill effects, although, surely, the distance between planets would be more than enough to sever their Wardens from any such planetary consciousness. On Lilith, for example, people can directly perceive the lines of communication between Warden colonies, yet they can perceive nothing of this while on other Warden worlds. Nor, in fact, could I conceive of such organisms even collectively storing and analyzing so many quadrillion-plus data bits just to do some fairly complex regenerations.

But when I thought of the Wardens not in terms of cells but rather in terms of neural transmitters and receivers, the system made far more sense. Consider the nerve endings in your index finger. They serve only one function really—they transmit information to the brain. Burn them and the irritation reaches the brain, and the brain then transmits back through the same network corrective measures to repair the burn. Warden colonies, then, are the neural transmitters and receivers of information, remote sensors to a central brain source. Such a brain must in fact be a tremendously versatile computer of near infinite capacity. This theory then fits in with everything else.

Everything all four worlds say about the Warden organisms on each also belies an external power source, as has been hypothesized as the reason for the so-called “Warden Limit” after which the Wardens run amok and destroy their hosts. The Wardens have been shown to be able to draw whatever they needed from the host for normal operation. On those rare occasions when more was demanded of them than the host could provide, they have shown a limited ability to make energy-to-matter and matter-to-energy conversions, although they are clearly not specifically designed to do so and, when demanded, this causes pain, discomfort, or danger to the host. Such an organism, unless far too much was demanded of it, would hardly self-destruct for the reasons supposed.

However, when you realize that the Warden organism is, in fact, too simple an organism to do anything for itself, being merely a transmitter and receiver, what the limit implies is the limit of its ability to transmit and receive information from its computer.

It is equally obvious that four different frequencies, perhaps four entirely separate transmitters, are in operation. This is why a Cerberan, for example, appears “Warden-dead” to a Charonese, who sees the Warden network in everything and everyone on his own world. But where are the brain’s transmitters and receivers—the Wardens’ base station, as it were? I suspect that there is a central computer outside the Diamond zone itself, perhaps on or beyond Momrath, although that gas giant with its rings and thousands of moons would be the most logical and logically placed location. This would transmit, in turn, to central areas, or subcomputers, on each of the four worlds, which would in turn directly govern those worlds. The two-tiered system would be extravagant, but it is one way of explaining why there is a fixed quarter of a light-year distance for travel from all four Diamond worlds, yet Cerberans can travel to Charon, for example, cut from their own planetary net but not from the central computer.

On Medusa there is a “sacred mountain,” and, remaining there overnight, one is subjected to nightmarish alien dreams and sensations only to awaken the next day with a far greater control of the Wardens in his own body. This mountain, I am convinced, is over the central processor for Medusa’s Wardens. Medusans are already plugged into their Warden network, but here, so close to maximum signal, their Wardens are far more excited than elsewhere. The experience is somewhat akin to, I believe, what communications scientists call “front-end overload,” in which a signal too powerful for the electronics of a transceiver will produce a blasting but unintelligible signal. However, the human brain, which has some control over its Wardens, reacts to this overload much as protective circuits would in electronics—it recoils and damps the overload down. The tremendously high level of excitation the overload produced in the Wardens, however, makes the host far more aware of them and their energy flow.

I am convinced that such points exist on the other three planets. I note, for example, that on all four worlds there are curiously similar religions based on planet worship, of a god who resides inside the world and is the source of all power for that world. If we were able to transport the entirety of Lilith’s population to its central processing facility, I am convinced that everyone would share the powers now limited to a few. The few who do, in fact, are mostly trans-portees to the planet who are likely to be more conscious of the energy flow than those bom with it in place. I shudder to think, however, of what such an overload would do to a Cerberan—madness, perhaps, or constant, uncontrollable body-changing, or perhaps the merging of minds into a single mass entity.

Point 3: We are faced, then, with an incredibly advanced civilization technologically, far beyond anything we can imagine, a civilization that can terraform four worlds, and stabilize and maintain them with a single clever device (the Wardens), yet does not apparently use them for anything. Although these aliens, who are apparently called the Altavar, maintain a token force near the Medusan processing center, and probably near the others as well, I do not believe they inhabit any of the four worlds in any numbers. One of my counterparts theorized them as air-breathing water mammals, but I find it difficult to see how such a civilization could have developed such a high degree of technological advancement if limited to water. Indeed, the few Altavar that I saw, via my remote, appeared equally at home in air and sea, and probably would also be on land. These, of course, were bred to the conditions in which they had to live and work, and are most certainly not representative of the Altavar masses in form of capabilities. Perhaps they are a token force, not guards or soldiers but on-site mechanics or engineers for the processor who simply relieve their boredom with random attacks on any who venture close.

Now, since they went to all this trouble but do not at this time inhabit the four worlds in the broad understanding of that term, it remains to be determined why the project was undertaken at all. Certainly it has all the earmarks of a carefully established scientific experiment, but if this is so, they made no attempt to remove an inconstant variable when introduced—humans—even though they could have easily done so, and in a manner convincing enough that we wouldn’t have bothered with further settlement.

Since they do not use the worlds now, they either had use of them in the’ past, in which case they couldn’t