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  Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

  ( Four Lords of the Diamond - 2 )

  Jack L. Chalker

  Cerberus is the water world of the Warden system. In its dense jungles only the most ruthless survive. If Qwin, the Federation’s finest operative is to survive and take over the mind of it’s evil lord, he must exchange his body for that of a man (right now he is a woman, but don’t ask) and do it fast!

  Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

  by Jack L. Chalker

  For Richard Witter, another unsung living legend to whom the SF community owes a great deal

  PROLOGUE

  Beginning Again

  There was not supposed to be fear in the structured and ordered society of the civilized worlds; there was some sort of law against it. Clearly, there was nothing to fear any more. And in a society like that, somebody who knew the true folly of complacency could get away with almost anything.

  Tonowah Resort was the standard for a standardized society. Golden beaches washed by warm, sparkling water and, set back from the ocean, a line of high-rise luxury hotels surrounded by exotic tropical plants and containing any sort of diversion that anybody might desire—from the traditional swimming, fishing, gambling, dancing, and whatever to the most exotic pleasure machines of a mechanized society. Leisure was big business in the Confederacy, where the basic manual-labor jobs were all totally computerized and human beings held jobs only because their leaders limited their absolute technology so people would have something to do.

  Genetic and social engineering, of course, had reached the state of the art. People did not look alike. Experiments had demonstrated that such a direction tended to kill self-esteem in identical-looking people and cause them to strive, somehow, for the most bizarre ways to prove their uniqueness. Nonetheless, variety was kept within bounds. Still, people were all physically beautiful, the men uniformly trim, lean, muscular, and handsome, the women exquisitely formed and stunning. Both sexes were generally of uniform height, about 180 centimeters give or take a few, and had a uniform bronzed skin tone. Previous racial and ethnic features merged into an average without extremes. Their family was the State, the all-powerful Confederacy that controlled some seven thousand six hundred and forty-two worlds over a third of the Milky Way Galaxy; the worlds themselves had been terraformed to conform as much as possible one to another. Medical science had progressed to the point that much of what ailed people could be easily repaired, replaced, or cured. An individual could remain young and beautiful until he died, quickly, quietly, at an age approaching a hundred.

  Children were unknown on the civilized worlds. Engineers did all the work and maintained the population stability at all times. Children were born in Confederacy labs and raised in Confederacy group families in which they were carefully monitored, carefully raised and controlled, so that they thought as the Confederacy wished them to think and behaved, as the Confederacy wished them to behave. Needed proclivities could be genetically programmed, and the child then raised with all he or she needed to become the scientist, the engineer, the artist, the entertainer, or, perhaps, the soldier the Confederacy required. All were not equal, of course, but living in the civilized worlds required only average intelligence, and only the specialized jobs required geniuses. Besides, overly bright people might become bored or question the values and way of life of the civilized worlds.

  There were of course aberrations, but these were few and far between; in fact, the society of the civilized worlds was the most egalitarian society ever known to Man. Places were found outside the structure for obvious aberrations. For those few who weren’t detected until too late, a small, specialized group known as Assassins ferreted out the rotten apples and eliminated the threat.

  There were worlds beyond the civilized worlds—the frontier, where nothing had yet been standardized. The best Confederacy analyses had predicted early on that a society such as the civilized worlds bred stagnancy and loss of creativity and drive, thus ending innovation and racial growth and eventually leading to the destruction of the human race from internal rot. To prevent all that, a small percentage of humanity was permitted to keep pushing outward, discovering and conquering new worlds and living in a more primitive style. Still subject to random gene mixing in the old tried and true ways, people out on the frontier were still very different-looking. Tight control was not exercised, for the Confederacy was not looking to make things easy out there. Hardship, deprivation, fierce competition, and aggression—all forced innovation, which was the safety valve for humanity, the system had worked for nine centuries because none were left to oppose the Confederacy—no alien races that could not be subjugated or eliminated easily, no competing empires that could threaten Man and his own empire.

  Until now.

  Until the nightmare theoreticians had warned about came to pass. Until there had come an enemy that so exploited the complacent egotism of the Confederacy that it could penetrate almost at will.

  Juna Rhae 137 Decorator knew nothing of this. She was merely one of the products of the civilized worlds, a person whose job it was to meet with citizens wishing to alter their dwelling’s appearance. She would sit down and discuss new layouts with them, run them and then psych profiles through her computers, and come up with new and different ulterior designs that would please her clients. As her name implied, she had been raised for this job, and since the Confederacy made few mistakes, she loved it and could think of no other citizen she would rather be. She was at Tonowah Resort just relaxing for a week, since she knew she would be busy for some time thereafter. She was about to face the greatest challenge of her career, a redesign of a Children’s Family Center on Kuro that was switching its function from raising engineers to raising botanists, who, Confederacy computers projected, would be in short supply in about twenty years. Interior decorating was extremely important to career-based Family Centers, so she was looking forward to the challenge and was gratified by the confidence placed in her. Still, it would be a long time between vacations.

  She had been swimming in the golden surf of Tonowah and just lying relaxed on the sand. Finally feeling relaxed and refreshed, she headed back to her luxury suite to shower and order a meal before deciding on the evening’s activity. Once back in her room, she washed quickly and phoned for a meal—a real gourmet-type treat, she decided, at least for tonight. While waiting for her order, she was punching up clothing designs on the aptly named Fashion Plate, a device that contained over three million complete clothing elements with which to create personally designed outfits. Juna, like most people at resorts, dispensed with clothing during the day but wanted something stunning, complimentary, but casual for evening, wear. In social situations she liked to be an object of attention, and it took clothes to accomplish that when everybody was gorgeous.

  She completed the outfit, based upon a clinging evening dress of sparkling emerald green, and punched in the code knowing that it would be manufactured and would appear in her clothing delivery slot within half an hour. The door buzzed, and she called for them to enter. A man dressed entirely in white stepped in, carrying a covered golden tray. Resorts anachristically retained human serving staffs, an extra touch of luxury; the men and women in the service industry loved what they were doing and would never do anything else.

  He entered, not even glancing at her nakedness, put the tray down for a moment on a table, then picked it up again with both hands and triggered little switches on both sides. She heard a short buzz, and from under the tray dropped thin, strong supports. The man deftly triggered what he alone knew was there, and the tray became the centerpiece on an elegant, modern dining table. He then lifted the cover, and she gasped and smile
d at the delights thus revealed.

  Though much meal preparation was roboticized, the chefs were top creative artists, designing new food delicacies all the time, and certain parts of such meals were even supervised and partly created by hand. Top hotels and resorts provided real food, not the synthetics and simulations of day-to-day life. She tasted the first dish, smiled as if enraptured, and nodded to the waiter that all was excellent. He returned her smile, bowed, then turned and left.

  When he returned more than half an hour later, she was out cold on the sofa. He went over to her, checked her physical condition, nodded absently to himself, then went back out and wheeled in a large laundry cart. He picked up her limp, naked body and placed it in the cart, covering her with some linen. Looking around, he spotted the lighted Fashion Plate and walked over to it and punched Cancel, then went to the master control panel and punched the Clean-and-make-up room button, which lit up. Satisfied, he pushed the cart easily out the sliding door and down the broad corridor toward the service entrance.

  She awoke slowly, groggily, not comprehending what had happened to her. The last she remembered she had been eating that wonderful meal when suddenly she’d felt incredibly tired and dizzy. She had wondered if she’d been overdoing things and had leaned back on the couch to get hold of herself for a moment—and now, suddenly, she was…

  Where?

  It was a featureless plastic room of some kind—very small, walls and ceiling glowing for illumination, and furnished only with the tiny, primitive cot on which she lay. A section of the wall shimmered slightly, and she stared, curious but naively unfearful, as a man stepped into the room. Her eyes widened in surprise at his chunky build and primitive dress, and particularly at his long, curly hair and bushy beard, both flecked with gray. He was certainly not from the civilized worlds, she knew, and wondered what on earth was going on.

  She started to get up but he motioned against it. “Just relax,” he urged in a voice low and rough and yet somehow clinically detached, like a doctor’s. “You are Juna Rhae 137 Decorator?”

  She nodded, growing more and more curious.

  He nodded, more to himself than to her. “Okay, then, you’re the right one.”

  “The right one for what?” she wanted to know, feeling much better now. “Who are you? And where is this?”

  “I’m Hurl Bogen, although that means nothing to you. As to where you are, you’re in a space station in the Warden Diamond.”

  She sat up and frowned. “The Warden Diamond? Isn’t that some sort of… penal colony or something for frontier folk?”

  He grinned. “Sort of, you might say. In which case you know what that makes me.”

  She stared at him. “How did I get here?”

  “We kidnapped you,” he responded matter-of-factly. “You’d be surprised how handy it is to have an agent in the resort service union. Everybody goes to a resort sooner or later. We drugged your food and our agent smuggled you out and offworld to a waiting ship, which brought you here. You’ve been here almost a day.”

  She had to chuckle. “This is some sort of resort game, right? A live-in thriller show? Things like this don’t happen in real life.”

  The grin widened. “Oh, they happen, all right. We just make sure nobody much knows about it, and even if the Confederacy does find out, they make sure you never hear about it, either. No use panicking everybody.”

  “But why?”

  “A fair question,” he admitted. “Think of it this way. The Warden planets are a good prison because when you go there you catch a kind of disease that won’t live outside the system. If you leave, you die. This—disease—it changes you, too. Makes you not quite human any more. Now, figure only the best of the worst get sent here. The rest get zapped or mindwiped or something. So what you have are four worlds full of folks with no love for humanity, being not quite human themselves. Now, figure some nonhuman race stumbles on humans and knows the two—them and the humans—will never get along. But the humans don’t know yet that these aliens are around. You following me?”

  She nodded, still not taking all this very seriously. She tried to remember if she’d ordered an experience program like this, but gave up. If she had, she wouldn’t recognize what was going on as part of the program anyway.

  “All right, so these aliens gotta know as much about humans as possible before they’re discovered. They’re much too nonhuman to go at it direct, and the Confederacy’s much too regimented for raising human agents. So what do they do? They find out about the Warden Diamond; they contact us and kinda hire us to do their dirty work for ’em. We’re the best at that sort of thing—and down the road the payoff can be pretty good. Maybe getting rid of this Warden curse. You get it now?”

  “Assuming for a moment I believe all this, which I most definitely do not,” she responded, “where does that leave me? You just said yourself that none of your people can leave your worlds. And why a decorator, anyway? Why not a general or a security tech?”

  “Oh, we got those too, of course. But you’re right—we can’t leave, not yet. But our friends, they got some real nice technology, they do. You’ll see one of their robots in a minute. So human it’s scary. That waiter who got you was a robot, too. A perfect replacement for the real person who once held that job.”

  “Robots,” she scoffed. “They wouldn’t fool anybody very long. Too many people know them.”

  The grin returned. “Sure—if they were just programmed and dropped in cold. But they’re not. Duplicated in their nasty little minds will be every memory, every personality trait, every like and dislike, every good and bad thought you ever had. They’ll be you, but they’ll also take orders from us, and they’ll be able to think and compute at many thousands of times the speed of you or me. They scare me sometimes because they could become us and replace us entirely. Lucky their makers aren’t interested in that sort of thing.”

  She was beginning to fell uneasy now for the first time. Not only was this show very real—she would expect that—but it was passive, talky, not the kind of thriller, show anybody would make up. But the alternative, that it was real, was too horrible to consider.

  “So you can replace people with perfect robots,” she managed. “So why a decorator?”

  “One of our clerical agents spotted your entry in the routine contracts a few weeks ago. Consider, Juna Rhae, that your next job is to redo a child factory. A place where they’re reprogramming to raise little botanists instead of little engineers, I think. Now, suppose we could do a little extra reprogramming there while you were going around replanning the place?”

  She shuddered. This was too horrible for a horror script.

  “Now,” he continued, “we’re set up. The moment you entered the Warden Diamond you were infected. Given a massive overdose of the pure stuff. Saturated with the Cerberan brand of the Warden bug. It’ll take a while before you’ll notice anything, several days or more, but it’s already there, settling into every cell in your body.”

  The door shimmered again and through it stepped a woman, a woman of the civilized worlds, a woman more than vaguely familiar to her although she appeared blank, stiff, almost zombielike.

  Bogen turned and nodded to the newcomer, then turned back to her. “Recognize this woman?”

  She stared, feeling fear for the first time aow. “It—it’s me,” she breathed.

  Her other self reached out and pulled her to her feet with an iron grip. The strength in that one hand was beyond any human. The robot Juna Rhae took the human’s hands and held them in a viselike grip with one hand while the other arm held her firmly around her waist. This hurt too much to be a show. She would never have ordered something like this!

  “We Cerberans,” Bogen said softly, “swap minds, you see.”

  The man reclined on a soft bedlike couch before an instrument-laden cluster in a small inner chamber of the space vehicle; he was wired, through some sort of helmet device, to the instruments around him. He looked tired, disturbed, and anxiou
s.

  “Hold it!” he called out.

  The massive computer all around him seemed to pause for a brief moment “Something wrong?” the computer asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

  He sat up on the recliner. “Let me take a break before starting this next one. I don’t think I can take two right on top of one another right now. Let me walk around, talk to a few people, generally relax, maybe even get some sleep. Then I’ll be ready. The Confederacy is not going to fall if I wait ten or twelve hours.”

  “As you wish,” the computer responded. “However, I do think that time is of the essence. This might be the one that tells us what we need to know.”

  “Maybe,” the man sighed, taking off the helmet. “But we’ve been rotting here the better part of a year with nothing much to do. Another few hours won’t mean anything. We’ll probably need all four anyway, and nobody knows when the next two will come in.”

  “All that you say is logical and true,” the computer admitted. “Still, I cannot help but wonder if your hesitancy is less governed by such practical matters.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “The Lilith account has disturbed you a great deal. I can tell it by your body-function monitors.”

  He sighed. “You’re right. Hell, that was me, remember. Me when I went down, and somebody I hardly knew at all when he reported. It’s kind of a shock to discover that you don’t know yourself at all.”

  “Still, the work must continue,” the computer noted. “You are putting off the Cerberus report because you fear it That is not a healthy situation.”

  “I’ll take itl” he snapped. “Just give me a little breathing room!”

  “As you wish. Shutting down module.”

  The man rose and walked back to his living quarters. He needed some depressant, he told himself. The pills were there, but he rejected them as not what he wanted. Human company. Civilized company from the civilized worlds, from the culture in which he’d been raised. A drink in the picket-ship bar, perhaps. Or two. Or more. And human beings…