Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold Read online

  “That’s no trouble,” I replied. “The company dispensary keeps some around. I can steal it pretty easy.”

  “Why bother?” she asked me, and pulled a small magnakey from her pocket “We always carry a small supply on the boats.”

  I not only could have kissed her, I did.

  “But what good’s nuraform?” Sanda asked. “I mean, you can’t switch with it, and if somebody’s knocked out with it they’ll know.”

  “Not if they’re asleep,” I told her. “Look, let’s go on to other phases of this operation. What about the chips?”

  “He took the job,” Sanda told me, “although it required some real haggling, and I had to do a lot of squirming. I also had to borrow Marga’s body to get in there, so I’m really going to have to find something to get her.”

  “You figure that out and I’ll get it,” I assured her. “Now—when will you have them?’

  “Tuesday. He was pretty firm about that, no matter what. I can send a messenger then, because it’s prepaid.”

  “Okay. I’ll need ‘em Tuesday evening, and I’ll drop down to pick them up. We’re looking good—fewer hitches than I’d ever dreamed. You can do wonders when you’re doing a duty deed for the boss. The amount of information I’ve gotten would have taken a year of hard and risky work.”

  “I still say you’re crazy and this plan’s insane,” Dylan said, shaking her head. “It’s so crazy and so complicated it can’t possibly work.”’

  “You think they make this kind of operation easy? Look, every corporation president, every syndicate boss, got where he was by doing the insane and crooked thing at just the right time. Even with that, their investigators will know they’ve been had. Within two weeks they’ll have figured out how it was done—although, hopefully, not who did it, since I’m not even the one getting rewarded at the end but pastured instead. No, they’ll come up with the right solution, all right, but the scheme is so crazy they won’t believe it themselves, and that’ll stop that. As for its being complicated—yes, I don’t like that. The more complicated something is, the more likely it is to go wrong. But at least there are provisions almost to the end to back out at any point, so if we do our jobs properly there’s minimal risk of getting caught. Don’t worry about that part—just worry about your own.”

  “I am,” Dylan responded glumly.

  “Look, let’s go through the key rehearsal now. Just think about this, both of you. If it works, you, Dylan, will have your own boat under nobody’s supervision and no real worries—independent and secure. And you, Sanda, I promise—if all goes as planned, we’re going to liberate you from the motherhood and do it so slickly that nobody will bat an eyelash. If you can be patient and not jump the gun, the three of us might wind up running this damned world in a couple of years.”

  Neither of them believed that, but they believed in me and that was enough. It usually was. Only this time, for a change, I wasn’t just pulling a con to set up a mission. I really meant business.

  “Now, let’s see what sort of hypnotic subjects you are,” I said.

  Sanda went under quickly and easily. Dylan resisted somewhat, and I could understand why and sympathize with her. After a long struggle she was who and what she wanted to be. Hypnosis was a threat to that. It took a good deal of smooth and soothing talk finally to get her to the point where she was willing.

  Sanda had romance to gain and absolutely nothing to lose in this whole business—if we weren’t caught on the spot. Dylan, on the other hand, had relatively little to gain but was risking all that she held dear in this business. She wasn’t really doing this for herself, but for me, and I knew it.

  I knew the routine well from past operations and had had a lot of practice. I’d also used Tooker’s computers to do a lot of medical research on exactly how to handle this particular ticklish business, but actually doing so would not be easy.

  Being there alone in a boat lounge with two attractive women in deep hypnosis was something of a kinky turn-on, but that feeling passed in a minute. This was business. In the Confederacy there were drugs and devices that could do this much better. But I was prevented from using the first by the Warden organism and didn’t have access to the second. That’s why we learned hypnosis from the start. You never had the right stuff around when you really needed it.

  They both seemed to be asleep in their chairs, and I went over to Dylan first. “Dylan, you will listen to my voice and nothing else, listen and trust me and do exactly as I say. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Sleepily, faraway.

  “Answer my questions truthfully, Dylan.”

  “I will.”

  “Would you ever betray me or my mission?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Dylan, why are you willing to do this?”

  “Because you want it.”

  “But why is that so important? Why should you take risks for me?”

  “Because I—”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I love you.”

  Love. A fascinating word and feeling. One I had used many times but still didn’t quite understand myself. Certainly love was usually an abstract concept on Cerberus.

  “You do love me, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very much. Very deeply. More than you’ve ever loved anyone, more than you love yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “You would trust me with your body, even your life.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I could trust you with my body, my life.”

  “You could.”

  I moved over to Sanda and repeated some of the process.

  “Would you betray us or our mission?”

  “No,” she assured me. “Never.”

  “Have you told anyone in the House about this?”

  “No.”

  “Has anyone there suspected you were up to something? Asked questions?”

  “One or two.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “I said I was in love with you and that you were in love with me.”

  “Did they believe you and press no more?”

  “They were envious,” she told me. “They ask me about you.”

  “And what do you tell them?”

  “I tell them you came from Outside and you work for Tooker.”

  “And what else?”

  The next segment was more than a little embarrassing to me personally. The romantic fantasies this lonely and bored young woman had concocted were graphic and hard to believe, and the image of me as someone approaching godhood was beyond any technique I’d ever studied. Still, it was satisfactory. They would understand those fantasies for what they were and put down a lot of her nervous excitement to meeting me.

  Her emotional patterns were at once simpler and more complex than Dylan’s or the average person’s. She loved, truly loved, Dylan, but she worshiped me.

  Confederacy agents are born and bred to their jobs and are as perfect as the biological and social sciences can make them for doing whatever needs to be done.

  As a youngster in the game I’d been amazed at how easily people could be turned, how malleable they were in emotions and will if only the right words were said at the right times, the right buttons pushed. It was something I’d never really thought about, something that came almost instinctively. Even now it still amazed me. Two women were in love with me and were willing to risk their necks and who knew what else for me.

  Even when they knew, as Dylan knew, they still went along. And yet standing there looking at the two women, I felt something that I had never really felt before, the stirrings of care, of concern, of real affection and appreciation for these two. Perhaps, I reflected, not quite understanding myself, I too could love. But business came first.

  I almost held my breath before this next one, since without it the whole thing would fall and have to be postponed. And time was running out on Turgan Sugal, and therefore on me.

  I had them bo
th open their eyes and rise, facing me. I instructed them to turn and face each other.

  “Feel inside yourselves,” I instructed. “Feel your mind. Feel the Wardens in your mind, calling out, connecting you one to the other, talking to each other mind to mind. Think of nothing else, concentrate on nothing else, but feel, hear, as they reach out, your mind to the other. Can you feel it?”

  “Yes,” they both answered in unison. “Dylan, you wish to be in Sanda’s body. You wish it more than anything else in the world. It is a beautiful body, not a mother’s body, and it is the ideal body you have always dreamed of. You want to be in that body. Flow into it, Dylan. Become Sanda’s. body. Sanda, you will not resist. You want to exchange bodies with Dylan. You will flow into hers as she into yours. And when your bodies have changed, you will both go back and sit in your chairs, still in a deep hypnotic sleep.”

  Apparently When both were hypnotized and so instructed the exchange went more quickly and smoothly than in the “natural” way. Or so the computers had told me, although they also warned that, once complete, it would take another ten minutes or so to set in. Actually, although consciously the exchange was complete at that point, it took up to seventy-two hours for a true set, but that wasn’t what I was after. All I wanted was a mental exchange, no more.

  In less than ten minutes both women moved—and sat in each other’s chairs. Dylan was now Sanda, and Sanda was now Dylan.

  I went over to the new Dylan. “Dylan? Can you hear me?” “Yes.”

  “Now, listen carefully. Soon I will awaken you, but you will still remain in a deep hypnotic sleep, even though awakened. And when you awaken, you will do the following exactly …”

  Although I was a master of autohypnosis and had even gotten to the point of sensing the Wardens inside my own body, this was a bit too tricky to trust just to myself. So when she awakened, I allowed her to put me under, and the process was repeated, with me going into Dylan’s old body and Sanda into mine. We were than all awakened, still under, and were able to compare notes, reactions, and the like. It looked like complete conscious control even in the short time allowed, and that satisfied me. We switched back again and Dylan brought me out, then I brought the two of them out, along with some handy posthypnotic suggestions. The suggestions wouldn’t last more than a day or two, but tended to be of the self-reinforcing type, in which each of them would put herself under and repeat quite a lot over and over. It was an advanced form of hypnosis with limited use, but it was more than handy for memorizing things to do and to calm nerves.

  All that afternoon we went over the plan again and again, until I was satisfied that all three of us had what we were to do down pat. Sanda had received permission to spend the night on the boat as long as she was in safe and enclosed quarters—their organization was run by a few incurable romantics, too—and we had a fancy dinner sent down from town which we ate on the aft deck.

  “One thing puzzles me,” Dylan remarked. “It seems to me you had all the elements to make this plan first. Which came first—the elements or the plan?”

  I laughed. “The elements, of course. The plan was tailored for what I could do and what my friends, associates, and close partners—you two—could do. It was a matter of stating the problem when it came up—Sugal’s subtle forced ouster—and then putting together all I had, all that I could have, and matching it up to the chinks I’d already found in this society’s armor. So far it’s all worked out—but if my research was wrong and something doesn’t go right, well, 111 try a different plan. Plans are easy—this one took only a few minutes—but execution’s the hard part, since you never really know what’s possible until you try it. Like tonight.”

  Tonight would be yet another test, really, and it would depend on me more than anything. All those two had to do was go to sleep, shielded from each other. I’d have a more difficult task, and all my plans and theories depended on it. It was logical, my computers told me, but there wasn’t much medical evidence to back it up—for obvious reasons, I knew.

  Which is why I sat, in a deep but aware hypnotic trance, in the same room as Dylan but unshielded—yet a good five meters from her bed. Sat and reached out and felt the creatures in my mind. It was an eerie sensation, really. There was no sight, sound, or smell to betray the Warden organism, but when you were deeply under—and occasionally while you were in a really deep sleep—you could hear them, sense them, talking.

  Not talking in any sense that we understand, but there was some sort of communication, some sort of linkage, as if one could sense the individual cells comparing information elsewhere. An energy network, intangible, invisible, yet very much there, creating a sense of linkage not only between minds but between literally everything solid around you.

  Under hypnotic control I was able to tune out much of it, all but Dylan’s sleeping form, which seemed almost to burn with the tiny tendrils of immeasurably small energy linking one Warden organism to another. I could feel myself being almost physically drawn to her, interconnecting with every part of her body, linking mind to mind, arms to arms, legs to legs, heart to heart. At this point, more deep than I’d ever been, I understood a bit more how those on Lilith must feel who could command, send messages through that network. One could also wonder, too, how such a creature as the Warden could have evolved, how it could possibly exist at all, on worlds otherwise not so different from many man had conquered, and far less alien than most. What are you? Who are you? Why do you exist?

  And there seemed to be a faint answer somewhere, from all around.

  We exist! We live! We are! That is enough!

  Dylan had gone from lighter, dream-filled sleep to that period people went through several times a night. Rigid, deep, dreamless. Her Wardens burned bright, talking, singing along fields of invisible force—hers to mine and mine to hers. And for the first time conscious as it happened, we changed. It was a strange experience, but not a terrifying one. There was something eerily satisfying about it, my body building up a tension and then the core of my being flowing along those fields of force toward that sleeping body and the core of hers to mine, providing a wondrous feeling I could not then and can not now describe.

  I arose in the body of Dylan Kohl, feeling somehow exhilarated, high, powerful. I went over to the dressing table, took the small bottle there and crept over to my old body, sleeping uneasily in the lounge chair. Carefully I placed it under his nose and pressed the stud, releasing a tiny whiff of vapor, which was quickly inhaled.

  The body sagged slightly and the breathing became deeper, a bit labored but no real problem.

  I shook him. “Dylan? Wake up.” I shook harder. “Wake up, Dylan!” I almost shouted in his ear, and there was no reaction.

  Satisfied, I clicked on the stopwatch, then tried moving the body. Though Dylan was a strong woman, she was still weaker than I was used to being as a man; I tried all sorts of ways to rouse the sleeper but got nowhere.

  Finally I sat down on the bed to wait it out, going over every few minutes and trying again to rouse the unconscious form. About the fourth or fifth time I tried, the figure groaned a little and turned slightly. I reached over and clicked off the watch. Twenty-four minutes and a few odd seconds. Time enough.

  Another minute or so, and I was able to shake Dylan awake. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes for a moment, seemingly unable to get his bearings, then sighed and looked at me. “So it does work.”

  I nodded, “Twenty-four minutes, with my additional body weight. I’ll bet it’s longer for your body. Any ill effects?”

  “I feel dead tired but otherwise nothing much,” Dylan replied,

  “Now it’s your turn,” I said. “Hippogryph.”

  The posthypnotic command took effect, sending her under quickly. With only a minimal briefing—we’d been over this again and again earlier in the day—I went back over to the bed and stretched out. It was several minutes before I could relax enough to drift into sleep. The old excitement, the old fun of this sort of thing was rising f
ully in me once again.

  We were able to get a reversal on me in under three hours, which was very good indeed, and then I tiptoed quietly into Sanda’s partitioned and shielded side to do much the same thing. I was tired, yes, but the hypnotic state was somewhat restful in and of itself and this was far more important. I could call on mental reserves when necessary.

  I didn’t use the nuraform on Sanda, since I didn’t need to—my body had already proven out—and I didn’t want any risks in her condition to her body.

  Sensorily, her body was also far different from Dylan’s or my own. The fetus inside her was far enough along that even now it had its own unique Warden pattern, one that I could sense, although its own Wardens were out of reach to me, must as the Wardens in the molecules of the ship itself or the dock or the bed. It was a curious feeling.

  Arising in her body was also something of a shock, as I was very much aware of the pregnancy and the vast differences in my new body, a body in a condition far stranger than merely the gender change from male to female and back again. My awakening on the prison ship that first time had almost been disappointing in that it felt so little different Sanda was a far more startling experience.

  But I had proved my theory and the heart of the scam. Proved it absolutely. I didn’t know why someone else hadn’t thought of it, too—but then again, maybe someone had. If so, it would take a rare sneaky mind like my own, since it required a knowledge of hypnotism and the body as well, and had involved an awful lot of homework that I would have found nearly impossible had I not worked at Tooker and had its vast computer system to play with.

  Sanda’s body was a marvel to me; I don’t know how anybody can cope with it. It was awkward, and I felt bloated, and there were other sensations a bit too odd to describe. I began to get some appreciation of why she wanted out of this routine, although I couldn’t believe it was like this most of the time. Still, I had to hang on for a bit, bring Sanda, now in my body, around and awake, and check out the one nagging doubt I had about my chosen personnel.