Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

CHAPTER TWELVE Project Phoenix

Dylan’s luck had gone down the drain, but mine was still holding up. She went up to the House for her obligatory purging, then stayed around a bit, with my blessings, looking up some old friends, getting some consolation and advice, and doing some general talking. Misery loves company, as Sanda pointed out, and deep down, nobody was more miserable than Dylan. Still, when she finally returned, it was with some interesting news. Sanda, after all, had been spending her leave with us and had hardly checked in up there at all.

“There’s a couple of women there under Cloister,” she told me. “New people I never heard of before. Really gorgeous, too.”

“What’s Cloister?”

“It means they’re restricted to the grounds of the House, and they’ve had their cards completely lifted. They can’t leave the place. It’s usually only done by the Syndicate as punishment for offenses, but they don’t seem to be like that at all. In fact you’ll never guess where they come from.”

I shrugged. “What’s the mystery?”

“They’re from Laroo’s Island,” she told me. “They were some of his—what? Courtesans? Harem? Whatever.”

The news piqued my interest for several reasons. “What did they do? Have a falling out with the old bastard? Or did he just get tired of them?”

“They’re not sure. One day—zap! The whole bunch were picked up and shipped to Houses up and down the coast under Cloister. They say they think it’s because of some big deal that Laroo’s using the island for. According to them lots of new faces and equipment were coming in—and have been for the past few months.”

She shook her head negatively. “But one of them saw a name on a stack of boxes—looker boxes.”

Better and better. “What was the name?”

“Project Phoenix.”

I punched up the encyclopedia on the roomvision monitor and checked the word. A legendary bird from ancient Earth cultures that was totally reborn by being completely consumed in names.

“Can you go back up to the House whenever you want?”

“As a Syndicate member, sure.”

“I want you to do just that. Get to know these women. Find out as discreetly as possible everything you can about Laroo and his island and this mysterious project.”

“As you wish,” she responded. “But I should warn you if you have any new schemes in your head. One of the things they psyched into me might foul you up. I cannot tell a lie. Not only not to you, not to anybody.”

I considered that. “Can you not tell the truth? I mean, if somebody asks you a question and you don’t want to give the answer, can you withhold it?”

She thought about it. “Yeah, sure. Otherwise anybody could pump me about you, and that would be illegal.”

“Well, use your common sense, but if anybody asks you a question the answer to which would cause any problems, tell them you aren’t permitted to answer that.”

“As you wish,” she repeated again in that rote tone.

I looked at her. “What’s that ‘as you wish’ stuff?”

“Conditioning. Any order or direction you give me that doesn’t violate Syndicate rules or my other conditioning I must obey. Don’t look so upset—you can’t change the rules. You can’t even order me to disregard them, because they thought of that, damn them! I have—a—a compulsion to serve. They have made me a totally passive individual and I will, well, suffer mentally if I’m not ordered about, set to tasks—in a word, dominated. Every time you give me an order and I respond I get—well, a feeling of pleasure, of well-being, of importance. I’m a human robot—I exist to serve you, and you must let me. You must—for me.”

I looked at her strangely. Was this the same Dylan Kohl who only a day before had coolly faced down one of the most horrible monsters of the sea? Was this the independent, gutsy schemer who got out of the motherhood, worked her way to captain, and helped rig a computer? It didn’t seem so. They had certainly done something to her. Something in its own way more horrible than the lobotomies the judge said were no longer civilized. In more than one sense, this was a far crueler thing to do. I didn’t know how to handle it.

“What sort of tasks?” I wanted to know.

“Prepare your meals, clean, run errands. Anything and everything. Qwin, I know this is hard on you, and you must know it’s hard on me, but it’s done. I accept it, and you must, too. Otherwise send me away to the House and forget me.”

“Never—unless you want it.”

“Qwin, I no longer have wants. Wants have been forbidden me. They stripped the wants away and left only a series of needs. I need to serve. I need to do my work as a mother. I want nothing. If you choose to keep me naked constantly scrubbing the apartment, that is what I will do, and what I must do.”

“Damn! There must be some crooked psychs I can pressure into getting this lifted!”

“No. These compulsions are so deep-planted that to remove them other than in the precise manner that they were applied would destroy my mind and make me a permanent vegetable—and that precise manner is stored in the master computer alone. They didn’t even have just one tech do it, but many, one at a time, so it couldn’t be reconstructed; that is the added hold they have. They alone can restore me. As long as I am a good example to the motherhood of what happens if you try and change your lot, I will remain this way. I would be this way even at the House, only subject to the orders of all the women of the motherhood.”

That master computer again! I had to crack Wagant Laroo! I just had to!

I pulled all my strings at Tooker, starting with Sugal, with whom I had a cordial lunch.

“You want something. You always do when you come up,” he told me, sounding not in the least put out.

“What’s Project Phoenix?”

He started. “Where did you hear that name?”

“I heard it. I want to know what it is.”

His voice lowered to a whisper and he grew increasingly nervous. “Man! You’re dealing with high explosives here!”

“Still, Turgan, by hook or by crook I will know about it”

He sighed. “If you heard of it at all, I suppose you will. But not here. In a public place. I’ll get you the information.”

He was as good as his word, although even he really didn’t know what was going on. Nor in fact did I depend entirely on him. I pulled every string and called in any lOUs I had, as well as using the ever-fascinating Tooker computer network, to which I still had access, to build my own picture. The elements, spread out in front of me in my office, gave a story that would emerge only through deduction and analysis.

Item: As I had already known, every single computer expert pulled from Tooker at the start of the last quarter had been expert in some form of organic computering. Most major organic computers and work on them had been banned long ago by the Confederacy, after some of the early creations, centuries ago, became more than human and almost took over humanity. That bitter, bloody, and costly war had made such work feared to this day. Those who dabbled in it were wiped or—sent to Cerberus? From Sugal and other sources I determined that we weren’t the only one tapped for such minds.

Item: A couple, of months earlier than this, major construction began on Laroo’s Island, partly to create a place for shuttle landings to be made in safety there. But a whole hell of a lot more than that was in progress, to judge from the crews and raw materials ordered.

Item: Interfaces between Tooker’s master computer—and other corporations’ master computers—were established on a high and unbreakable scramble, relayed by satellite. The relay system’s other end pointed to Laroo’s Island, although officially it was interconnected to the Lord of the Diamond’s command space station in orbit around Cerberus. That raised an interesting question: if the work was so super-secret, why not the space station? It was almost as large as the island, and if one allowed for the shuttle dock, power plant, and fixed structures on the island, it was a damn sight bigger in usable space.

Item: Interestingly. Hroyasail’s own area for trawling had been increased by almost 50 percent shortly before I took over, something I never would have noticed if it hadn’t been reflected in the quota plan for the quarter, a document I was only now getting to know ultimately. Seaprince of Coborn, about the same distance south of Laroo’s Island as we were north, had an equal increase. A look at corporation affiliates and a check with the previous quarter’s quota plan showed that an entire Tooker trawling operation, Emyasail, was in the previous quarter’s plan but was totally missing now. Its area had been given to Hroyasail, which was natural, and Seaprince, which was most unnatural, since Seaprince was a Comp-world Corporation subsidiary, not one of Tooker’s. You didn’t hand valuable territory to a competitor that close voluntarily, so Compworld had to have given something really major in return and nothing like that showed in the books. In fact records showed that Tooker’s skrit harvest since the quarter began was down sharply, indicating a dip into the reserves by next year. So it wasn’t voluntary, and only the government could force such a move.

These facts alone, put together with what only I really knew of anyone likely to compile them, painted a stark picture.

Item: The only folks anybody knew about now using uncannily human organic computers were our aliens and their spy robots, robots known to have a connection with the Warden Diamond. That was why I was here. But the alien robots were so good that no research project would be really necessary on them—and even if it was, it wouldn’t be carried out here, not on Cerberus or any other Warden world, and certainly not by any of our people, who were definitely behind the aliens in this area.

And yet the conclusion was inescapable: Wagant Laroo had converted his former retreat and resort into an organic computer laboratory, staffed with the best of his own that he could find and supplied by Emyasail’s trawlers. Why trawlers and gunboats and not by air? Well, for one thing it would attract less attention and give the appearance to onlookers of business as usual in Emyasail’s area. Also, there appeared to be some paranoia about many aircraft in the vicinity of Laroo’s Island.

I paced back and forth for several days and also talked the matter over with Dylan, who, having less background in this sort of thing than I did, came up even more of a blank. However, her more parochial outlook gave me the key I was looking for. “Why are you assuming the aliens have anything to do with it?” she asked me. “Why isn’t this just a new scheme by Wagant Laroo?”

That stopped me cold. Suddenly all the pieces fell into place, and I had at least part of the picture. “No,” I told her, “the aliens have everything to do with this—only they don’t know it!”

“Huh?”

I sat down. “Okay, we know that these aliens are able to make facsimiles of people, people with jobs in sensitive places they have to gain access to. We know that these organic robots are so good they fool literally everybody. Not just the machines that check to see who’s who, but everybody. Close friends. Lovers. People they’ve known for years. And they even pass brain scans!” I was getting excited now. “Of coursel Of course! How could I be so blind?”

She looked concerned. “What do you mean?”

“Okay, so first your agents pick out the person they want to duplicate. They find their records, take holographic pictures, you name it. And from that, our alien friends create an organic robot—grow is a more apt term, if I remember correctly—that is absolutely physically identical to the target. Absolutely. Except, of course, being artificial it has whatever additional characteristics its designers want—eyes that see into infrared and ultraviolet, enormous strength if need be. Since it’s made up of incredibly tough material instead of cells, with a skin more or less grafted on top, and powered perhaps by drawing energy from the fields that surround us—microwaves, magnetic fields, I don’t know what—it can survive even a vacuum. The one that penetrated Military Systems Command seemed to have the power to change its components into other designs—it actually launched itself into space. And yet it fooled everybody! Bled the right blood when it had to, knew all the right answers, duplicated the personality, right down to the littlest habit, of the person it was pretending to be. And there’s only one way it could have done that.”

“All right, how?”

“It was the person it was pretending to be.”

She shook her head in wonder. “You’re not making any sense. Was it a robot or a person?”

“A robot. An absolutely perfect robot whose components could provide it with whatever it needed, either as a mimic or as a device for fulfilling its mission or getting away. An incredible machine made from tiny unicellular computers that can control independently what they are and do—trillions of them, perhaps. But the aliens solved the problem we never did, and never allowed ourselves the research time to do—they discovered how to preprogram the things indelibly, so they’d be free and complete individuals yet never deviate from their programming, which was to spy on us. So now they build them in our images, and—what? They bring them to Cerberus. No, not Cerberus, probably to the space station.”

Dylan frowned, puzzled. “You mean they’re around here?”

I shook my head. “No, what happens next has to be something like this. The target is snatched-—kidnapped. Probably on vacation. At least at a time when he or she won’t be missed for up to a couple of weeks. The victim is brought to the station and infected with the Cerberan version of the Warden organism and allowed to season there. Then—Dylan, you remamber that drug you stole to get out of the motherhood?”

She nodded. “I—I got it off a shuttle pilot.”

“Great! It’s coming together nicely. So, after seasoning, their target is given some of this drug and introduced to the similarly infected robot facsimile. The target’s mind and personality goes into the robot’s, but the robot is already preprogrammed as an agent.”

“As they programmed me,” Dylan said emotionlessly.

I nodded. “Only a far more sophisticated method. A psych machine wouldn’t do the job, since they need the complete person—and only that person’s attitude is changed. No, it’s in the original programming of the robot when it’s made by the aliens, of that I’m sure.”

“But how can this robot return and replace the original?” she asked. “Wouldn’t the Warden organism destroy it when it left?”

“No, not necessarily. Remember, there are several items, several products that even now can be sterilized. Apparently these robots can too. Basically, all they do is get out of the system. The Wardens die, but so adaptable are the quasi-cellular components of the robot that they can make immediate repairs. The target returns to work from ‘vacation,’ the absolutely perfect agent-spy. It’s beautiful.”

“It sounds too much like what happened to me,” she noted.

“I’m sorry,” I said gently. “I was. admiring a finely Grafted gem. I don’t want to make light of the human tragedy involved. Still, considering the size and complexity of the Confederacy, it’d be almost impossible to block them all out, and the major damage has probably already been done.”

“And Laroo’s Project Phoenix?”

I considered it a moment. “There’s only one possibility I can come up with, and it’s a terrifying one in some respects. The aliens have no reason to use the island, and less reason to use people who know less about their robots than they do. To put any of their operation directly on a Warden world would eventually tip off the Confederacy anyway, and they know the Wardens are ‘hot’ for them right now. No, for the answer you have to think as Wagant Laroo thinks, from the perspective of the Warden Diamond, and the answer becomes obvious.”

“Not to me it doesn’t,” she said.

“All right—all along we’ve wondered just what the aliens could offer the Four Lords other than revenge. Well, here’s the payoff. When they win, the Four Lords, and those others whom they choose—maybe even the whole population of all four worlds—will be given new bodies. Perfect bodies, those of organic robots. You see what the Four Lords were offered? A way out. Escape. The freedom to leave. If these agent robots can do it, anybody can. But there’s a hitch, one that necessarily paranoid Lords like Laroo would immediately think of.”

“I can follow this part. What’s to stop these aliens from preprogramming the payoff robots as well, so they have a population of superhuman slaves?”

“Very good. High marks. So here you’re given a way of escape and you dare not use it. What would you do?”

She thought a moment. “Study theirs and build my own.”

“All right. But it’s unlikely that you could do it without such a massive plant that the Confederacy watchers wouldn’t take notice. Besides, it might well involve construction materials or support materials not found anywhere in the Warden Diamond, maybe unknown to anybody on our side at this point. What if you couldn’t build one?”

“Well, I guess you’d order a few you didn’t need as agents from the aliens, who have to trust your judgment in these matters, and use them.”

“Right again! But these will come preprogrammed by a method unknown to our science. To make them work you have to find out how they are programmed and eliminate the programming. No mean trick, since it’s probably integrated with instructions on how the robots function and those you have to keep. The best you can do is hope. Gather everything you can, and everybody who might know something about it, lock ’em up on the island with the robots, lab, computer links, and whatever, and try and find an answer. And that’s what Project Phoenix is all about.”

“Laroo’s not only getting back at the Confederacy,” Dylan said in an almost awed tone, “but double-crossing the aliens, too!”

I nodded. “I have to admire the old boy for that, anyway. And it’s probably not just Laroo but all the Four Lords. And I think I know, at least, how the robots are getting in and out, too. It has to be in the shuttle system. But aside from the Diamond they go only one other place—the moons of Momrath. Out there someplace, possibly inside those moons’ orbits, alien and Warden human meet.”

I sat back, feeling satisfied. In one moment I’d solved at least half the Warden puzzle. I didn’t know anything about the aliens, true, and I had no idea as to the nature and scope of their plot, but I now understood, I felt certain, much of the Warden connection.

“And what good does it do you to know these things?” Dylan asked. “You can’t do anything about them.”

Good old practical Dylan! Her comment was on the mark. What could I do?

Or more accurately, what did I want to do?

Kill Laroo and topple the system, yes—but even if I figured out how, did I really want Project Phoenix to fail?

At the moment I knew only one thing. The biggest deal in Warden history was happening out there on Laroo’s Island—and I wanted in on it.