Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

worry about it—it’s permanent. But we prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock and we haven’t the time to allow you to ‘set in’ completely, as it were. This method will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel that you have a difficult enough assignment as is, perhaps impossible.”

I felt the excitement rising within me. The challenge, the challenge …

“Your objective world is’Medusa, farthest out from the sun of the Diamond colonies,” the Commander’s voice continued. “If there is a single place in the universe where man can live but wouldn’t want to, it’s Medusa. Old Warden, who discovered the system, said he named the place after the mythological creature that turned men to stone because anybody who’d want to live there had to have rocks in his head. That’s pretty close to the truth.

“The imprint ability of this device is limited,” he continued, “but we can send you one basic thing that may— or may not—be of use to you on Medusa. It is a physical-political map of the entire planet as complete and up-to- date as we could make it.”

That puzzled me. Why would such a map not be of use? Before I could consider the matter further, and curse my inability to ask Krega questions, I felt a sharp back pain, then a short wave of dizziness and nausea. When the haze cleared, I found that I had the complete map clearly and indelibly etched in my mind.

There followed a stream of facts about the place. The planet was roughly 46,000 kilometers both around the equator—and in polar circumference, allowing for topographic differences. Like all four Diamond worlds, it was basically a ball—highly unusual as planets go, even though everybody, including me, thinks of all major planets as spherical…

The gravity was roughly 1.2 norm, so I would have to adjust to being a bit slower and heavier than usual. That would take a slight adjustment in timing, and I made a note to work on that first thing. Its atmosphere was within a few hundredths of a percentage point of human standard—far too little difference to be noticeable, since nobody I know ever actually experienced that human standard in real life.

Medusa’s axial tilt of roughly 22° gave the world strong seasonal changes under normal circumstances, but at over three hundred million kilometers from its F-type sun it was, at best, a tad chilly. In point of fact, something like seventy percent of Medusa was so glaciated that it consisted of just two large polar caps with a sandwich of real planet in between on both sides of the equator. Its day was a bit long, but not more than an hour off the standard and hardly a matter of concern. What was a concern was that those wonderful tropic temperatures were something around 10° C at the equator or at midsummer, and that could drop to-20 at the tropic extremes in midwinter. But the life zone did extend for some distance beyond that—up and down to a jagged glacial line at roughly 35° latitude, give or take a few degrees, and in that subtropical zone at midwinter a brisk -80° C. Some climate 11 sincerely hoped that they provided free insulated gear from the moment of arrival, particularly since that map in my head said that a’ number of cities were located in the coldest areas.

Continents were pretty much irrelevant, since the seas were frozen down to the habitable zones all the time and down to almost the tropic lines half the year. There were three distinct habitable land masses that I could see from the map, though, so you might as well say three very wide and very thin continents. Throughout the habitable latitudes there was a lot of mountain that didn’t help the climate much, and a huge amount of forest, all of which seemed to be various evergreen types. Nothing familiar, of course, but familiar types in any cold climate.

A rocky, terribly cold, hostile world. Calling it human-habitable was stretching things a bit, no matter the air you breathed. About the only thing of interest was that Medusa, of all places, showed the only evidence of vulcanism on any of the Warden worlds. No volcanoes—but that would be too much, anyway, for any person to stand. But there were large thermal pools, hot springs, and even geysers in the midst of the barren wastes, some in the coldest regions. Obviously there was something hot beneath many parts of the surface.

There was animal life, though—mostly mammals, it seemed, of a great many varieties. That figured, really—only mammals could survive that kind of climate. Some were nasty, some harmless, some a little of both, but nothing alive could be taken for granted on such a fierce, harsh place where just staying alive took tremendous effort.

Well, I’d better start loving it, I told myself. Short of suicide, there was no way to avoid calling it home. At least it was a supposedly modern and industrialized world, so there would be creature comforts.

“Medusa is ruled with an iron hand by Talant Ypsir, a former member of the Confederacy Council. Ypsir attempted to engineer a coup of sorts more than thirty-five years ago. It was hushed up, and he dropped from sight and disappeared from the news, but the object of his coup was to make fundamental changes in the way the civilized worlds, and even the frontier, were organized and administered. His system was so brutal and so naked a grab for absolute personal power that he eventually shocked even his most ardent adherent’s who betrayed him. Unlike Charon’s Aeolia Matuze, also once a Council member, Ypsir was never popular or trusted, but he had an absolute genius for bureaucratic organization and was at one time head of the civil service. Be warned that he and his minions run Medusa with the same brutal, methodical system he once hoped to impose on all mankind, and that the cities are models of efficiency, as is the economy, but in every way absolutely under his control. His government controls only the organized settlements, however—although that is the bulk of the more than twelve million people estimated to be Medusa’s current population. As his industries are fueled from the mines on the moons of Momrath, the gas giant that is the next planet out from Medusa, and there is little in that wilderness except water and wood, he makes no effort to extend his authority to that wild area.”

I remembered Matuze well, but I had to admit I’d never heard of this Ypsir. Well, it was long ago and the Council was pretty large. Besides, who the hell ever knows the head of the civil service anyway?

As to who I was, I got my first mental picture of myself from the briefing, and it was a bit of a shock. I’d had a sense of being younger, true—but the body I now wore was little more than fourteen, barely into puberty. It was, however, a civilized-world-norm body, and that was good enough, although it was from Halstansir, a world I didn’t know. I could infer a lot, though, simply from the skin, basic build, and facial features. I was now relatively tall and thin, with a burnt-orange complexion, and the boyish face had jet-black hair but no trace of sideburns or beard, almond-shaped black eyes, and fairly thick, flat nose over broad lips. It was a strong, handsome face and body—but very, very young-looking.

So what was a fourteen-year-old boy doing on his way to the Diamond? Well, Tarin Bul of Halstansir was a rather exceptional young lad. The son of a local administrator, he’d been raised in pampered splendor. But Hal- stansir’s Council member, a man named Daca Kra, had apparently used the boy’s father as a scapegoat in a minor scandal, exposing him to ridicule and personal ruin. The older Bul just couldn’t stand it, and, refusing psych treatment, killed himself instead. Such things happened occasionally, particularly on the upper political levels. What didn’t happen, even occasionally, was what the boy, who just about worshiped his father, had done then. Taking advantage of the natural sympathy of the first families of Halstansir, Tarin Bul had plotted, planned, and trained to get to a reception for Daca Kra—where he’d assassinated the Councillor, in mid-handshake, by the rather quaint and ugly method of disembowling the man with a sword used in physical training. The boy was a prepubescent twelve at the time, which caused more problems than the nearly unprecedented assassination.

Of course we picked him up and got him off-planet, where we had him evaluated by psychs, but he’d withdrawn from the world into a better one of his own imagination after carrying out the kill. The psychs could hardly reach him at all, though they spent a lot of time trying. Normally they would have simply done a complete wipe of his mind and built a new personality, but Kra’s family used some influence of its own. So now Tarin Bul was out of his shell and on his way to Medusa—but “not really. Bul had died as soon as my mind displaced his. 7 was now Tarin Bul, and I wondered how an ex-Councillor would take to a boy who’d killed one of his colleagues.

Still, that would be a ways off as yet. I could see certain real advantages in the body—not the least of which was the fact that I had an extra thirty years or so on my life—but there would also be disadvantages as well. There would be the tendency to treat me as a child—and, because it was my cover, I had to go along to a certain extent. But though children get a bit more license than adults in simple behavioral areas, they are also subject to more rigid social controls. That realization led me onto the path of determining my best and most effective persona. The fact that Bul was a male of the civilized worlds bora to a political family meant his IQ and general formative education would be expected to be well above average. The fact that he’d engineered a successful assassination and survived, even being sent to the Warden Diamond, was another plus. I would have no trouble convincing anyone that I was