Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

CHAPTER THREE Orientation and Placement

We entered a small lounge, and were greeted by two men and a woman, all dressed like soldiers in tight-fitting khaki uniforms and boots, although we quickly learned they were not military. We were given robes and sandals as a temporary measure; then our names were checked against a clipboard list and we were quickly ushered out of the terminal to a waiting air-bus. Robe or not, it was damned cold and the bus’s heating system, though good, was hardly comfortable.

We lifted quickly and swung out away from the terminal, and with this maneuver we had our first look at our new world. It was a strange vista—the ocean gleaming in the sunlight to our right and the “shoreline” to our left, but shore it definitely was not. Rather, it was a dense-looking forest of reddish-brown and orange trees topped with huge, broad leaves of varying shapes and sizes. At many points the trees had been partially or completely cut into. Clearly, people lived inside the trunks themselves—you could see sunlight reflected off windows. Here was a surrealist’s vision, this great forest with trunks half resembling ancient, gnarled trees of tremendous size and half resembling a complex of modern office buildings. Often we could see where some of the great trunks branched, one had been cut off horizontally and then refinished or surfaced with some glossy material, providing landing platforms and entryways.

The woman in charge saw us gaping and smiled. Picking up a small PA mike, she became an impromptu tour guide. “Welcome to Cerberus. My name is Kerar, and my two associates are Monash and Silka. You are in the Borough of MaDell. We use boroughs here because the nature of the living space makes anything as dense as a big city nearly impossible. Fortunately, with efficient transit we are able to link up areas sufficient to make cities in economic terms, and that’s what we call boroughs. As you can see, there is no land whatsoever on Cerberus. Biologists tell us that people were once tree-dwelling creatures. Here, of necessity, we have returned to our origins.”

I kept looking out the window at the eerie tree-land. Somehow the whole place looked like a piece of furniture I once owned, with a support pole and several flat, clover-like surfaces surrounding the stem as small shelves. Of course, this was much larger and rougher-looking, and not all the “shelves” were flat or barren, but it still had that look about it.

“You are seeing many different types of trees,” Kerar continued. “There are over five thousand varieties of big trees on Cerberus, with about eighty different types in MaDell alone. As you can see, many types can be used extensively as dwellings, since much of the circulatory system goes around the outside of the trunk, allowing the trees to be hollowed out without killing them. A few are naturally hollow, although the outer bark in most parts is up to eight meters thick. They can support an enormous amount of weight because they get much thicker below the water’s surface, and, over the millions of years they evolved, they also support each other. Master botanists have a special place here because they are responsible for telling us how many branches can be cut off for building and landing zones, and which ones, and also which architect’s ideas for tree dwellings are practical and which are not. Mistakes can be costly. The death of one key tree might well undermine the support for a dozen, even hundreds more, in a mushroom effect that might kill our whole community.”

I could see the point she was making—don’t mess around with the trees. I wondered how many of the earliest pioneers had, and what sort of damage they’d wrought.

I looked out toward the ocean and caught sight of many boats, some quite large, others obviously pleasure craft—even some sailboats. Looking back into that fantastic jungle, I caught sight of a huge, imposing structure up ahead, a gleaming, modern building many stories tall sitting atop one of the cut-off sections, which, I was to learn, were called mesas on Cerberus.

“Up ahead is the government center for the borough,” our guide informed us. “That is where we are heading.”

We were ushered into the place and guided past curious onlookers to a tenth-floor room. There waiting for us was a hot buffet lunch. I frankly didn’t recognize much of what was there, but after all that time on prison food it tasted just great. After we had eaten, while we were all just sitting around enjoying that stuffed feeling, an efficient little man came in and took our measurements. Within a hour he was back with some bundles, which turned out to be underwear, a pullover thick shirt, work pants, heavy socks, and low boots. Also included were belts and a full range of cosmetics and toiletries. In twos we were taken down the hall to a full lavatory complete with showers, which we all happily used; then we put on our clean, new clothes. I had little trouble with so simple an outfit despite the gender problem, but was thankful that my hair had been cut very short, prison-style. Come to think of it, though, Kerar’s was short, too, although professionally cut and styled.

Finally, now that we were feeling human again, they decided we were ready for the full briefing. We sat in folding chairs while our guide gave us the basic stuff.

“The first world to be explored in the Warden system was Lilith,” she began. “Lilith is a beautiful world, like a tropical garden. From their base camp, the first Exploiter Teams reached and set up bases on the other three Warden worlds, as well as examining the moons of Momrath, a huge gas giant further out. What they didn’t know was that they were carrying an organism from Lilith, an alien thing like no other.”

Briefly she recounted how the organism at last had struck Lilith, wiping out all manufactured things and reducing the population to primitive savages. Machines wouldn’t work there, and the entire society was nontechnological. I couldn’t help but think of my poor counterpart on Lilith. I was good, yes—the best. But I was born and raised and existed my entire life in a highly technological society. How would I be able to function in a nontechnological one? Would I be able to? I wondered, and felt more relieved that it wasn’t my problem.

“The organism,” Kerar went on, “was carried to the other places, where it thrived and mutated. There are many theories on this, the most logical being that it reacts to the sun’s relative energy and perhaps the amount of solar wind itself, but nobody really knows. Here, as you can see, it did not destroy machines. On Lilith, its native world, it adapted men to the planet, made them a part of Lilith’s ecosystem. Here it had to be the one to adapt, and it did. It’s inside you now, moving in, making itself comfortable, settling down in every molecule of your body.”

We all stirred at this unpleasant thought, which we’d managed to push to the back of our minds until now. It was funny—I didn’t feel any different. No dizziness, no signs of anything out of the ordinary.

“Early scientists had the idea that the organism had some sort of collective intelligence,” Kerar told us. “It became obvious that every single tiny subviral form was somehow in contact with every other one. We now know that they were only partly right. It is one organism, each one like a part of a cell to a huge body, but it doesn’t think. Its behavior patterns are well known and quite consistent. Once you know how it acts, it will never surprise you.

“On Lilith, this intercommunication led to some people getting tremendous power, since the organism there exists in literally every molecule of solid matter. Some there can simply will a hole to be cut in rock, for example, or cause trees, fruit, even people to mutate. This works because some minds are so strong that they can transmit their will through the Warden organisms in their own body to others in people and things nearby. Here we have a different effect.”

Again there were murmurs, and again I thought of my poor counterpart. Such a world would seem to be one of magic, and there magic alone worked.

“On Cerberus,” our guide continued, “the organism is also in every molecule of solid matter. We’ve found it in tree samples taken by divers a full kilometer below the surface of the sea, and in the sea and air creatures themselves. As on Lilith, it doesn’t like things that don’t have Warden organisms inside them, and it will invade them as it has you. It seems to have a much easier time with organic molecules, though, particularly ones in living creatures, because it adapts to you with little trouble. Put a manufactured item from, say, the Confederacy here, though, and it will try and invade that, too—not very successfully. The stuff just doesn’t work and usually falls apart. Fortunately, it doesn’t care which kind of Warden creature is there, at least on Cerberus, so we can import raw materials, finished products, and food from our fraternal worlds, and with the exception of Lilith, export our goods to them. The Lilith original just won’t take anything that upsets the primitive nature of the planet.

“Now, there are some good things about this invasion of your body. For one thing, since it depends on you to give it what it needs to live, it keeps you in tip-top shape. It purges your body of disease, so nobody gets sick. It cleans out the blood vessels and directs cellular repairs, so you don’t get cancer, heart attacks, strokes, or whatever. Even things like drugs and alcohol, for the most part, will be purged before they can have any effect—with the exception of solids from the Warden system, and those are very rare and restricted. The worst you can do to yourself is get a little fat or out of condition. And of course the organism cannot retard the aging process, although even there it keeps you in far better shape far longer than normal.”

That was an interesting benefit, I told myself. Still, no more getting drunk or high or using any kind of recreational drugs. This was a clean world.

Kerar looked at us and smiled a bit, pausing before dropping the other shoe, the one only she truly knew about. “However, you are fortunate to have been sent to Cerberus. Only the best are sent here. No murderers, no persons with violent histories. This is not a violent world, and for very good reason. You see, only we here on Cerberus have the potential of living forever.”

There it was—along with an interesting additional bit of information. No violent criminals. I wondered why.

When the rest of the group had caught hold of itself, she continued her orientation. “I told you that on Lilith people could contact and command Warden organisms, and control and change them. That does not happen here. However, all the Warden organisms here are in constant contact with others, with proximity being the guide. The closer you are to somebody or something else, the more contact the Warden organism has with the other. When you are awake, your consciousness controls those within your body and there is no problem and no effect. But if you are tired, sleepy, or asleep, or in semiconscious or unconscious state, the Warden organisms reach out to others near them.” She paused a moment, choosing her words carefully. “I’ll give you an example, with the understanding that we know what happens but we have never discovered exactly how it happens.

“Let’s say I go to sleep here next to you, and you fall asleep too. Unlike those on Lilith, Warden organisms here tend to communicate mostly with those in complementary positions, so those inside you don’t communicate with, or link with, or whatever it is they do, those in rocks, trees, and the like the same way they do to those in other people. Freed from conscious restraint, the Wardens in your body would link with the Wardens in my body. This linkage would become strongest during the short periods of sleep when we aren’t dreaming. If two of those periods match—mine and yours—the Warden organisms in your brain and mine would link, and, for reasons we don’t understand, start to exchange information. Now, remember, I told you that the creatures are in every molecule and actually can cleanse, change, repair, or replace parts of your body to keep you healthy. In the same way, as a by-product of their very nature, they change the molecules in your cerebral cortex to my code and mine to yours, even adjusting the brain-wave pattern to match. It’s done in a matter of minutes. Since memory is chemically stored and electrically retrieved, this means a total change of information within the brain. So you wake up with my memories and personality, and I wake up with yours. In effect, we have switched bodies.”

“Then why don’t they switch all the information?” a bearded young man to my left asked skeptically. “You should have hormonal imbalances, differentials in respiration and blood pressure—enough wrong commands tailored for the wrong body to cause it to be very wrong and very sick.”

“Agreed,” she responded. “Good question. The answer is simply that in the early days some of that happened, but it no longer does. The Warden organism is incredibly adaptable, and it exchanges information with other parts of itself, even with other organisms outside its physical form. It learned. As to why it wants to do so—well, we don’t know. We’re not even sure it does. The person may be a by-product of its unique life form. It may be some necessary adjustment to keep itself going in the Cerberan atmosphere. We don’t know. I’m not sure we ever will. But it does happen, it has, and it almost certainly will continue.”

“Have you ever switched bodies?” another skeptic asked.

She smiled. “Many times. I am a native, unlike you. The switching phenomenon comes with puberty—a rite of passage here, you might say. Adolescents here undergo many switches, particularly since that age is more highly emotional and so control is more difficult. Besides, what adolescent could resist the experimentation? Boys curious about what it’s like to be a girl, vice versa—that sort of thing. I often wonder what it would be like to be trapped at birth in a particular gender and body. I, for example, was born male, but by the age of sixteen, having been in three male and two female bodies, I found myself more comfortable, somehow, as a female. I found a female who felt more comfortable as a male and we slept together and settled it. However, don’t think we run around swapping bodies as often as we change clothes. We don’t. Oh, some of us change often, and there are occasional marriages where the partners switch around constantly, but those cases are rare.”

A thought had occurred to me early in her talk and I wanted to get the question out before it slipped away. “You said it takes several minutes to exchange minds during this sleep,” I noted. “What happens if you’re awakened in the middle of it?”

“Normally, once the exchange begins it can’t be stopped—you remain comatose, as it were, even if the building’s burning down,” she replied. “However, there are cases—very rare—when this happens. You’re right to bring it up, since it occurs only among people from Outside like yourselves. The odds, I should emphasize, are one in a million, even to you. The transfer is all at once, so to speak, so all of the molecules in your brain start their rearrangement together. If you are jolted awake early in the process, you’ll have a dim remembrance of that other life which will usually fade. If this happens late in the transfer, you’ll have a period of psychological problems, a sort of schizophrenia, but that too will pass and the dominant information will control. But if the process is just about exactly half over, then both of you will be in both bodies. There is a lot of extra space in the cerebrum and the new information will slowly shift to the unused parts, creating either a total split personality—two minds in one body, alternating—or a merger into a new personality that is a combination of both. And, understand, this will be the case for both bodies. But I wouldn’t worry; there have been less than twenty such cases in the history of Cerberus. You almost have to do it deliberately, and nobody wants that.”

I nodded. Those seemed like favorable odds. She returned to her basic briefing once more, with a new question from a woman on the end.

“What happens,” she was asked, “when a switch occurs to someone in a critically skilled field? I mean, suppose your doctor now has the mind of your janitor? How can you tell?”

“That was an early problem,” we were told. “In a non-technological age or setting, like Lilith’s, it probably wouldn’t have been solvable. Fortunately, tiny electrical patterns in the brain set up to handle our specific memories are unique to each individual. The new brain adjusts to the new pattern. We have sensitive devices able to read and record that distinctive electrical ‘signature,’ and you’ll find them all over the place. Before you leave here today we’ll take your imprint and this will open your account in the master planetary computer. Early imprint reading devices were quite bulky, but now it’s a simple device, quickly and easily used, and it is used for everything. There is no money here, for example. You are paid according to job and status directly into your computer account. Any time you wish to make a purchase, your imprint is read and compared to your identity card. As you can see, it is virtually impossible for anyone to masquerade as someone else, since it is a crime not to report a body change within eight hours of its occurrence.” She paused for a moment, then added, “For a society founded by what the Confederacy calls criminals, Cerberus has probably the most crime-free civilization in man’s history.”

I could see that this thought disturbed some of the others, and it disturbed me to an extent, too. In the most literal sense of the word, this was probably the most totalitarian society ever built. Not that crime here was impossible—the society was computer-dependent, and anything computer-dependent could be manipulated. But the system had few weak spots, and the ultimate penalty of death for crimes was even more terrifying here, in a society where it might be possible to move from body to body and stay young—if there was a supply of bodies, and if the government let you.

Were there old people here? I wondered. And if not, where did all the new, fresh bodies come from?

After another meal, they interviewed each of us in turn and had us take some basic placement tests, a few of which were familiar. The interview went smoothly enough, since their file on Qwin Zhang was no better than the one fed me and I could be creative where necessary with little fear of tripping up. But the personality tests, both written and by machine, were much, much more difficult. I had spent many months in classes and exercises learning how to get around such things, how to give the examiners the picture I wanted them to have—it involved knowing everything from the theory of testing to the exact nature of the psych probe machines used, as well as sell-hypnotism and total body control—and I felt reasonably certain that nothing thrown at me was not properly and correctly countered.

Later still we were holographically photographed and fingerprinted, had our retinal patterns taken, that sort of thing, and were also hooked up to a large machine the operative part of which looked like a test pilot’s crash helmet. This, then, was the imprint-taker. A bit later we were taken in and a small headset with three fingerlike probes was lowered on our foreheads and a check made on a computer screen. Apparently the big apparatus was used only for the recording of the imprint; the little device would be the familiar control mechanism for checking it. There was no sensation with either device, and therefore no way to figure put how they operated, something I very much wanted to know. Unless you could fool or defeat that system any authority could trace your life exactly—where you were, whom you were with, what you bought, literally everything.

In the evening they brought in cots for us. Apparently we were to remain there several days—until the Warden organism had “acclimated” itself to us—while they decided what to do with us. A book on the basic organization of the planet was provided, too. Dry but fascinating reading, including a great deal of detail about the social and economic structure.

Politically there were several hundred boroughs, each with a central administration. Some were quite small, others huge, and seemed to be based on economic specialties as much as anything. The Chief Administrator of each borough was elected by the Chairmen of the Syndicate Councils in each borough. The syndicates were also economic units, composed of corporations of similar types, all apparently privately owned stock companies. The economic system was, then, basic corporate syndicalism. It works rather simply, really: all the like companies—steel, say—get together to form a syndicate headed by a government specialist on steel. The needs of the government and the private sectors are spelled out, and each steel company is given a share of all that business based on its size and productivity, guaranteeing it business and a profit, that margin also set by the syndicate and government expert-the Steel Minister, let’s call him. The only competitive factor is that a corporation within the syndicate which markedly increases productivity—does a better job, in other words, perhaps for less and thereby increasing its profits—will get a bigger share of the next quarter’s business.

Extend this to every single raw materials and basic manufacturing business and you have a command economy, thoroughly under government control and management, that nonetheless rewards innovation and is profit-motivated. Only on the retail level would there be independent businesspeople, but even they would be under government control, since with profit margins fixed all wholesale prices would also be fixed. Then, using something as simple as borough zoning and business licenses, the government could apportion retail outlets where the people and need was. Because no money changed hands and the government handled even the simplest purchases electronically, there could be no hidden bank accounts, no stash of cash, nor even much barter—since all commodities would be allocated by and kept track of by the syndicates.

Nice and neat. No wonder there were so few crimes, even without the ultimate punishment angle.

From the individual’s viewpoint, he or she was a free employee. But since the ultimate control was the governments, you’d better not make the syndicate mad or you might find yourself unemployed—and being unemployed for more than three months for reasons other than medical in this society was a crime punishable by forced labor. It seemed that those basis raw materials came mostly from mines and works on several moons of Momrath, and the mining syndicate was always eager for new workers.

To do anything you needed your identity card, which contained all your physical data, including your photo, but no name or personal details. That was on a programmable little microchip in the card itself which could be changed automatically should someone else find himself or herself in your body. Not to report a change was a crime punishable by being locked in an undesirable body and packed off to a lifetime of meaningful labor under the shine of beautiful Momrath.

The next day I asked our hosts how it would be possible to lock someone into a body, and was told that some people, through sheer concentration and force of will, could essentially “cut off” your Warden beasties from sufficient contact to make a switch. These people, called judges, were on call to the government; they didn’t judge but merely carried out sentences. Top judges working together could actually force a transfer, too.

And of course there it was. Older, undesirable bodies were always around, and you could reward the faithful with a young, new body while shipping the malefactor off to Momrath until he or she dropped dead.

Chief industries were light manufacturing in general, computers and computer design, weapons, tools, all manner of wood products, seafood protein, and fertilizer. They even exported some of this stuff beyond the Warden system, something I hadn’t realized was possible. It was even possible to “sterilize” some types of things, mostly inorganic compounds, and keep them together and working. That led to an obvious connection. That very human robot that had broken into the defense computers, for example. Was it possible that somewhere here among the more primitive machines, at least one place was turning out these sophisticated robots to some alien-supplied design? And if so, was there here some sort of programming genius capable of turning out robots so real they would fool even close friends and family, as had the alien robot? It sounded and felt right. No violent criminals here, they said. Only technological ones. The best.

By our fourth day all of us were becoming bored and restless. As much as could be learned in any brief period bad already been taught us, so obviously we were being kept here at this point only for reasons not yet revealed by our hosts. For me, the wait was getting dangerous, since several of the prisoners had formed casual liaisons and I’d been propositioned repeatedly. Pressure mounted as I became a “challenge” to a couple of the men. I had no desire for any such experience, not in this body, but the situation was causing a social gap to open between me and the others. I wanted this waiting over with and for us to be out in the world as soon as possible.

I also wanted classification, something they certainly should have been able to do long before now, considering all the tests. I’d tried to angle the aptitude parts heavily toward computers and math, since not only was that consistent with the individual I was supposed to be but also that was where the greatest potential for moving up and finding out things might be. Besides, I’d listed a high level of expertise on many of the older-type computers in use here.

Near the end of the fourth day it hit me just what we were waiting for. Obviously, if some measure of control was needed, they didn’t want to throw us Cerberan virgins out before we knew just what the Warden facts of life would be. Close proximity, they’d said.

All those cots all close together.

Acclimation, they’d told us, took three or four days, so it was about right. They were waiting, then, until the morning when all or most of us woke up in different bodies.

That thought brought up a mental dilemma for me. If we had to switch to leave, I’d rather leave as a man—but because of the personal problem I noted, I’d been sleeping off in a corner nearest the other women but more or less to myself. How many days would it take? I wondered. And did I have the skill and the guts to get on with this? I finally decided I had to give it a try or be trapped on the wrong side. So I picked my man carefully with an eye to age, looks, physical condition, and the like. Fortunately, my candidate, Hull Bruska, was a shy, somewhat gentle-seeming man who had caused me the least problems. His crime was even more remote from people than Qwin’s had been. Apparently he’d managed electronically to tap and shift small parts of planetary budgets into frontier accounts, all from a small repair service on one of the civilized worlds. He was somewhat proud of his accomplishment, and not at all hesitant to talk about it. The cause of his downfall, ironically, was that he was too successful. Too much money showed up in the accounts of several frontier banks, the kind that attracts security police just because of the size of the assets. Obviously he needed to use more than the four banks he did to spread it out. When a bank’s assets quadruple in less than two years without apparent cause, you know somebody’s going to ask how, but Bruska’s forte was machines, not the fine points of getting away with the spoils.

Curiously, he had no real plans for the money. He’d done it, he told me, mostly out of boredom. After nine years of repair and redesign of financial computers he’d simply worked it out as a mental exercise, “more or less for fun.” Then when he’d put his plan into action just to see if it would work, and it had, doing it again became sort of irresistible, almost to see how much he could get away with. “I wasn’t really hurting anybody,” he explained, “and there was a tiny bit of satisfaction in fooling the whole Confederacy, of putting one over on them. Kinda made them human.”

I liked Bruska, who also enjoyed talking about himself enough that we never got through the hand-holding stage that night. He was shy enough as a man that maybe, I hoped, becoming a woman would open up a whole new social life for him.

We slept very close, my cot against a wall and his next to mine to minimize any risks on my part. I fell asleep that night hoping against hope I’d get lucky, and quickly.