Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold Page 22

  Bogen sighed and shook his head, but all his belligerence was gone. “This is too big a decision for me to make, you know. I’m going to have to buck this to Laroo. You, too, probably.”

  “Suits me fine.”

  I sent back word with the boat crew that I would be remaining at least overnight, and gave Dylan some encouraging news, in the simplest form of code. I didn’t really care if Bogen’s people figured it out or not; if he didn’t have some foreknowledge of me and my nature he didn’t deserve to be in the business.

  Then I waited for Bogen to call his boss, and finally he returned. “Okay,” he said, “He’s coming in tomorrow afternoon. Earliest he can get away. You’re to stay here as his guest until he hears you out and makes a final decision.”

  “What about my wife?” I asked, somewhat concerned. “She has no credit, remember.”

  “She’ll be all right through tomorrow. My people will be there if she needs anything. After that, well, we’ll see. Remember, your future and hers are hanging by a thread right now.”

  Didn’t I know it! Still, I was committed now. “Well, since I’m either in or dead, mind letting me see one of these wonders of the universe?”

  He thought it over. “Sure. Why not. Come on.”

  We rode down in one of the transparent elevators, far beyond the ground floor and into the vast trunk of the main support tree itself.

  The lab facilities down there were quite modern and impressive. Along the way I ran into several old Tooker employees who saw and greeted me, but Bogen wasn’t in the mood to let me renew old friendships.

  The center of all this activity was an eerie lab in two parts, with a monitoring and control panel of unfamiliar design on one side and a series of small booths along an entire wall. A young and very attractive woman with long black hair trailing down over her traditional lab coat was checking a series of readings on one of the machines as. we entered. She glanced up, saw Bogen, and rose to meet us.

  “Here’s the best mind on Cerberus, and one of the best in the whole galaxy,” Bogen beamed.

  She smiled and put out a hand. “Zyra Merton,” she introduced herself.

  I was startled even as I shook the thin, delicate hand. “Qwin Zhang. Did you say Merton?” She laughed pleasantly. “Yes. You’ve heard the name?”

  “I sure have. Somehow, though, my vision was always of some little old man with wild hair and a beard.”

  “Well, I am pretty old,” she replied good-humoredly. “In fact, I’m close to a hundred and eighty. The reason why I came here, almost ninety years ago, was not only to study the Warden processes on Cerberus but also because it was at the time the only way to save my life. However, I assure you that I am and have always been a woman, and I’ve never once had a beard.”

  I laughed back. She was charming, and a surprising answer to the question of just who Merton really was.

  “But tell me, where did you hear my name?” she asked.

  “I’m a product of what the Confederacy calls the Merton Process,” I told her.

  She seemed very interested. “You mean they solved the problems? It cost too many lives and too many people’s sanity ever to be very practical, I thought. I abandoned that research when I turned entirely to researching Cerberan processes. That was—let me see—fifty years or so ago.”

  “Well, they solved some of it,” I told- her. “Not the attrition rate, though.”

  She looked disappointed and a bit angry. “Damn them! Damn me! My biggest regret has always been that I developed the thing to begin with and sent out the data in so incomplete a form. Still, in those days there were few people here, and not much technology or governmental structure, and I was dependent on outside support to get anywhere. Still, I’d like to give you a complete psych scan sometime, just to find out how far they did go with it. It’s a dead end beyond what you say, I fear.”

  I decided not to tell her how much of a success the Confederacy thought it was. Out of respect for my counterparts on Lilith, Medusa, and Charon, I didn’t want to blow too much right now.

  “I’ll be glad to—sometime,” I told her sincerely. If I could trust anybody on this crazy ball it was probably her, if only for her scientific detachment.

  “Zhang’s interested in our friends,” Bogen told her. “Can you give us a bit of a demonstration?”

  She nodded. “Glad to. Got one that’s just about ripe.”

  “Ripe?”

  “Finished. Complete. Ready to go.” She went back to her instruments and punched in a series of instructions. A slight buzzer sounded over one of the booths, and a red light came on. After a moment the red light went out and was replaced by an amber standby, then a green.

  She left her panel, went over, and opened the door to one of the booths. The sight revealed startled me. It was the body of a tall, muscular man to civilized worlds’ norm. He looked recently dead.

  “Two one two six seven—awake and step out,” she instructed.

  The cadaver stirred, opened its eyes, and looked around, and into its whole body came an eerie sense of life, of full animation. It walked out of the box, suddenly appearing very natural.

  I went over and looked at him. Doing so made me a little uncomfortable, because suddenly it was a person and not a thing I was eyeing as I would a piece of sculpture.

  “The most amazing marriage of organic chemistry, computer, and molecular biology I have ever seen or known,” Merton told me.

  “This is a robot?”

  She nodded. “They don’t come packaged exactly like this, I should tell you. They arrive in a roughly human-old shape and with the same mass, but that’s about all. From cell samples supplied us, we’re able to graft an entire skin onto it so perfectly that it is an exact duplicate of whoever’s cell we use. The material we use for it is similar to the stuff used on the entire device, but it’s capable of following and using the genetic code of the original. When we have the original subject handy, it can add in moments any scars, blemishes, or oddities to make itself a complete duplicate.”

  “How the hell can you make something like this?” I gasped.

  “We don’t, and can’t. The Confederacy could if it wanted to. Even then, the design would be different. It takes very little time in close examination to see these devices are the product of a society and culture that is extremely alien to our own. Not that scientific laws are violated—they aren’t. But the whole evolution of science up to this point came from a far different series of steps.”

  “Where do they come from, then?”

  She shrugged. “We have only a few here, partly for seasoning and partly for experimental purposes. They don’t let us have too many, and only when we have a specific individual in mind. They’re pretty careful.”

  “But the whole thing is done here? All the mind-changing?”

  “Oh, no. It can be done anywhere in the Warden system out to a point roughly one hundred and sixty million kilometers beyond the orbit of Momrath. Just as long as it’s done in an atmosphere containing only Cerberan Wardens. I don’t know the details.”

  “And this doesn’t disturb you? That we’re using these to spy on the Confederacy?”

  “Not really. Why should it? Everything that government does turns to dust or ashes, including the people. We have an entirely new, fresh technology here from an entirely nonhuman evolution, and that’s far more interesting. I can hardly blame them for not announcing themselves to the Confederacy. Every alien race we’ve ever touched we’ve murdered, literally or culturally.”

  “You sound like you would have gotten sentenced here if you hadn’t come voluntarily,” I noted.

  “Probably,” she laughed. “We’ll never know. But it worked out, anyway.”

  I stared at her, thinking hard. “And you haven’t been able to solve the programming riddle? If you can’t, can anybody?”

  She looked questioningly at Bogen, who nodded, and then she turned back to me. “It’s not all that simple. Here, let’s go over to the scope.”
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  We walked over to the instrument cluster. “I don’t recognize any of this,” I told her. “Whose is it? Your own design?”

  “No. It’s supplied by the makers, too. That’s part of the problem. Here. Look in the screen.”

  I looked, and saw a close-up of a cell. No, not a cell. Some sort of unicellular animal, it seemed, like the amoeba.

  “That’s a cellular unit from one of the robots,” she told me. “It really isn’t a cell, although it acts like one. It’s a complete self-contained microcomputer using organic molecules and an organic structure.” She fiddled with a dial and the tiny thing was gone, replaced by a horde of tiny things swimming in a clear river.

  “The molecular chemistry itself’s a nightmare,” she told me. “It’s not that we’re seeing anything unusual. No special elements we’ve never seen before, nothing like that But they’re put together in a way I couldn’t even imagine. There is in fact no way I know to build or grow something like that, composed of all those elements and compounds, and make it work. For example, I can take carbon chains and sulfur and zinc, potassium, magnesium, and a hundred other compounds and elements and put them together—but never would I get something like that.” She shifted the focus to the cellular wall and blew it up almost impossibly large. “See those tiny little hairlike things? They’re the electrical connectors to the surrounding cells. Like nerves, yet not like them. Connected up, they form & conscious communications system from cell to cell. The brain can tell any cell, or any cell group, what it wants the little bugger to do, look like—you name it, and it can do it. Mimic almost anything. Even functional things. Impossible. Inconceivable. Even in our best bad old days of the robot war we had nothing that could do that. We might have had, though, had they not banned further research and development.”

  “I get the point. What you’re telling me is that even the Confederacy couldn’t reprogram or deprogram the things.”

  “Nothing of the sort! Given one of these, they probably could. But we—we’re at a dead end. We are able to see how it’s done, but we can’t do it—or undo it—ourselves. And most important, we can’t tell the necessary programming from the unnecessary stuff. See?”

  I did see. “But you think the Confederacy could?”

  “Only because they have bigger, faster, quasi-organic devices themselves. I doubt if they could duplicate this, but they could probably tell it what to do. That’s why each cell has a self-destruct switch. If it’s incapacitated or in danger of capture, it simply melts down. All of it”

  “Seen enough?” Bogen asked impatiently.

  I nodded. “For now, anyway. I’m impressed, I have to say that.” I was more than impressed. The damned things scared me to death.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Wagant Laroo

  I spent an extremely comfortable night in one of the guest rooms, surrounded by old masters and sleeping in the kind of computer-controlled luxury I’d almost forgotten existed. I slept late, knowing I might need all my wits about me, and had a sumptuous brunch; then, with the permission of the National Police, and under their extremely watchful eyes, I toured the collections upstairs. All in all it was a fascinating day as well as providing solutions to enough unsolved spectacular thefts to earn any cop a seat in the hall of fame, if they have one.

  In the late afternoon a flier approached and landed on the front lawn I still found so nice. Out stepped five men, each carrying a briefcase. There was nothing particularly unusual about any of them, so I could only stare out the window and wonder which was Laroo.

  That, it seemed, was the real trick.

  “You never know which one of the party is him,” Bogen warned me. “He has about two dozen people that are so good at acting that they actually represent him at various functions, and he usually travels with a group. He can be any one of them—and you’re never sure if you’re talking to the real one or not.”

  That made me a little nervous. “So the real one might not be here at all.”

  “Oh, one of ‘em’s him, I guarantee. This is that kind of decision. The best way is just to treat any of ‘em as if he were Laroo. The real one’ll get everything.”

  I nodded uneasily, and we went down to the Lord of the Diamond’s elaborate office. The idea that Laroo played such tricks made me a bit uneasy. Another thing that could go wrong, I thought nervously.

  I was ushered in and introduced to a tall, handsome man with prematurely white hair that gave him the look of a distinguished politician. I looked over at the others. One of them was short and fat and looked a little like Otah, but hardly anything like I imagined the Lord of Cerberus should look. I’d pick that one, I noted to myself. Nobody could ever take somebody who looked like that seriously as a dictator. I looked around at the others sitting there, relaxed, eyes on me. I wondered if they knew who was who right now.

  I went up to the Laroo indicated, stopped, and bowed slightly.

  He put out his hand and flashed a politician’s smile. “You don’t have to go through that shit,” he ‘told me pleasantly. “We’re all businessmen here. Here, have a seat and make yourself comfortable.”

  I did as instructed. He just sat there a moment, looking me over. “So you’re a First-Class Assassin,” he finally said.

  “Was,” I responded, relaxing a bit “I’m no longer interested in that part of the work.”

  “I’ve viewed the tape of your conversation with Bogen yesterday and checked the instrument readings. It seems we have a truly valuable and interesting man in you, Zhang. I’m curious, though. If you volunteered for all this, why did you turn yourself around?”

  “I didn’t volunteer,” I told him truthfully. “I was nominated, elected, put to sleep, briefed, and woke up on the prison ship.”

  He laughed at that. “Sounds like ‘em, all right. And now you’re in business for yourself. Well, I have a few more questions of a more practical nature.”

  “Fire away.”

  “First, assuming we let you go ahead with this, what guarantees do we have that you won’t double-cross us?”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Double-cross you? All by myself? Look, turn it around. Once I’ve done it, what guarantee do I have that you won’t then decide just to terminate me?”

  “Fair enough. So we’re starting on the basis of mutual trust. A good foundation. You know what we expect to gain. What about you? What do you want out of this?”

  “Well, before we go anywhere with this, I’d like my wife’s judgment set aside. She’s got some mental problems and the judgment stands in the way of solving them. That comes before anything—as a gesture of trust. Also, I’m going to need her, since she’s the only check I have that the Confederacy’s agents won’t pull a fast one on me.”

  Wagant Laroo seemed more than a little amused, as did the others. I noted with some discomfort that their reactions to my statements were virtually simultaneous—and identical.

  “You know, I like you, Zhang, or whatever your name really is. Here you are, a prisoner on my island, and with a flick of a finger I could sweep you away as if you’d never been. Considering this, you start demanding terms and advance payment! I really do like that.”

  “If you accept my idea, then it’s perfectly reasonable,” I told him. “If you don’t, then I’m gone anyway.”

  He nodded, liking the answer. “That’s true. You already know I’m interested, or I wouldn’t have interrupted my very busy schedule to get here. More, there’s an extra feeling of urgency on my part to accomplish something, purely for my own protection. Marek Kreegan, Lord of Lilith, was assassinated yesterday.”

  “What!” I felt a rise of excitement within me that I could not suppress.

  He nodded gravely. “Actually, it was something of a fluke, I’m told, but it was a direct result of the Confederacy putting somebody there to do it. I, and the other planetary leaders, must assume that there are Confederacy assassins out to get all of us, a clever and backhanded way to strike at us. Tell me, wasn’t that really your as
signment?”

  Honesty was the best policy. Besides, they probably had already burglarized Dumonia’s office and records anyway. “Yes, it was. Deep down there’s still a psych command to that effect in my brain, but if you’ll check with Dr. Dumonia he’ll tell you it isn’t an imperative in any way—and I have already changed my game plan. I would have anyway after discovering that. I don’t like people, even those people, messing with my mind,”

  “I think I believe you,” he told me. “But that doesn’t alter the fact that you’re probably not the only one.”

  “Almost certainly not,” I agreed, feeding his paranoia with the truth. “They told me at the time that there might be others.”

  “Exactly. That means Project Phoenix is even more urgent in my case. You know, I was giving your proposal much thought, and I got to wondering why I shouldn’t just have a robot made of you. That would most certainly assure your loyalty, honesty, and cooperation.”

  I felt a tinge of panic. That was a line I’d thought of as one of the major risks—and one I had no real counter for.

  “It won’t work,” I lied as smoothly and convincingly as I could. “The kind of mental training I had for my entire life would be placed into direct conflict with the robotic programming. An internal war would ensue, and at best, insanity.”

  He thought it over. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. We’ve never had someone of your unique training and upbringing before. Still, I can see the logic in it, and I’ll check it out with a psych. Go get some dinner now—Bogen will show you where—while we discuss this and while I check out that particular point.”

  The interview was over, but I didn’t feel too good about it nor did I feel much like eating. Bogen, who stuck with me, seemed quite satisfied with himself, so I knew immediately where the idea had come from. After killing some after-dinner time, we were summoned back into the five presences, this time with even less ceremony.