Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail flotd-4 Read online

  That sounded like a recitation of holy writ, but it was okay with me. We were both janitors—so what? But she hadn’t answered my. first question.

  “You’re a smart girl,” I told her, only partly flattering her, “and you speak very well. You have an educated vocabulary. So how come you’re down here with us low-graders?”

  She sighed and looked a little uncomfortable.

  “If you’d rather not tell me, I will understand,” I said soothingly.

  “No, it’s all right. I’m adjusted to it now. And yes, you’re right, they say my IQ’s way up there—but it’s not much good to me. You see, back a long time ago, maybe when I was born or even before, something funny happened in my head. They say it’s like a short ckcuit in an electrical line, only the affected area is so tiny they can’t find it and fix it. In most things I’m just as normal as anybody else. But when I look at words, or bunches of letters, they get all mixed up, somehow.” She pointed to the computer terminal. “I can do fine on that thing with voxcoder. But I look at the keys and they all just sorta run around in my head. I can understand the voice fine, but I get all mixed up when anything’s printed on the screen.” She shook her head sadly and sighed once more. “So you’re looking at the smartest illiterate on Medusa, I guess.”

  I could understand her problem—and the State’s. In a technological society, it was necessary to know how to read. No matter how you cut it, it was necessary to read the repair manuals, or trace an engineering diagram, or follow procedures for getting out of a burning building. On any of the civilized worlds she might have been treated, although this sort of thing—“dyslexia,” it was called—had never been wiped out. Still, it didn’t quite make sense to me, considering the holy Wardens.

  “How come the Wardens don’t fix it?” I asked her. “I thought nobody gets sick or has problems.”

  She shrugged. “The experts they sent me to say it’s because I was born with it. Maybe it was the way I was made up, and the Wardens think that’s the way I should be. They finally said that even if they found it and fixed it my Wardens would probably un-fix it, ’cause they think the way it is, is the way it should be. I learned to accept my handicap, but it drove me crazy, mainly ’cause I was smarter than most of them who got good test grades and are now in school working toward good jobs.”

  I could sympathize with her on several counts. Anybody could sympathize with the frustration of being smart and also restricted, but I realized that this Warden business was kind of tricky on birth defects. It proved to me that only genetically engineered humans were truly moral or practical—not that I needed any proof, since I was the product of genetic engineering myself and so was Tarin Bul.

  “So does that mean you’re stuck being a waitress or janitor or something else like that?” I asked her. “Doing those jobs machines can’t or don’t do but which require no reading?”

  “Oh, I can do a little better than that, if I prove it,” she answered confidently. “After all, if I can talk to a computer and the computer can talk back I can still use it okay. But, yeah, you’re right. Beyond a certain point there are lots of jobs I could do but literate persons could do a little faster or more efficiently, so they get the jobs. But that’s not what I’m supposed to do anyway, after a while. Why do you think they paired us, anyway?”

  I thought a moment. “Because neither of us fit?”

  She laughed at that. “No—well, maybe. I hadn’t thought of that. But eventually we’re supposed to found a family group. I’ll be the Base Mother—I’ll maintain the house and take care of the kids. And I’ll be able to teach ’em when they’re young, and nobody’s gonna mind if I need a vox to do the budget. It’s not so bad. Better than being in a deadend job, or any of the alternatives, like being a Goodtime Girl or working the mines of the moons of Momrath.”

  Aha! Another set of pieces fall into place. “Then, in a way, we’re married. At our age!”

  She gave me a big smile. “I guess you can say that. Sort of. Why? When do people marry Outside?”

  “Well, mostly they don’t,” I told her honestly. “Most people are genetically engineered to do a particular thing and to do it better than anything else. You were raised by specialists and trained for what you’re going to do, then you do it. But, yeah, there are some marriages.” All types, too, but there was no use complicating things for her. “Most people don’t bother, though.”

  She nodded. “They teach us something about Outside, but it’s really hard to imagine anyplace else than here. I know a couple of people who’ve been to Cerberus, and that’s strange enough. They switch minds and bodies all the time and live on. trees in the water. Crazy.”

  Body-switching, I thought. My counterpart there must be having a field day. “That sounds pretty weird to me, too,” I assured her. “But maybe one day I’ll see it. They think when I’m old enough I can become a pilot.”

  That romanticism lurking inside her peered out of her face again. “A pilot Wow. Have you ever flown anything before?”

  I shook my head from side to side. “No,” I lied, “not really. Oh, my father occasionally let me take the controls once we were underway, and I know everything there is to know about flying. But, I mean, I was just twelve when I got arrested.”

  That brought my past back into focus, and, as I suspected, she was trying not to think in that direction. Still, she asked, “If you were born in a lab or something and raised in a group, how could you. have a father?”

  That was an intelligent question. I was becoming more and more impressed with her. “Those of us in certain positions, like politics and administration, have to have some kind of family so we can learn how things work and make the personal contacts we need,” I explained. “So, when we’re five, we’re adopted by someone in the position we’re intended to be in someday. Sometimes it’s just business, but sometimes we grow real close, like me and my father.” Acting time, boy—give a good performance. Face turns angry, maybe a hint of bitterness in my voice. “Yeah—like me and my father,” I repeated slowly.

  She looked suddenly nervous. “I’m sorry. I won’t bring it up again unless you want to.”

  I snapped out of my mood. At least the performance was good enough for her. “No, that’s all right. He was a great manvand I don’t want to forget him—ever. But that was long ago and it’s over. Here and now is what’s important.” I paused for dramatic effect, then cleared my throat, sniffled a little, and changed the subject. “What about these Good-tune Girls? What are they?”

  She seemed relieved at the opportunity to get out of a sticky situation. I hoped I’d just laid to rest a lot of otherwise inevitable prying about a past I really didn’t have, the area most likely to trip me up. “Goodtime Girls is a general title for the entertainer class. It’s a dead end, but they’re put under psych so they don’t think much.” She shivered. “I don’t want to talk about them. They’re necessary, of course, and serve a need of the State, but it’s not anything I’d like.” She suddenly yawned, tried to repress it, couldn’t, then shook her head. “Sorry. It’s getting near my bedtime, I guess. I usually like to sleep in the middle of the off-time, so I have time before work to do things. If you want to do it differently we’ll have to work something out.”

  “That’s all right,” I assured her. “I’ll adjust to your schedule for now. You get some sleep—I’ll manage. If I can’t drift off, maybe I’ll just explore the dorm for a while and see what all is here. I’ll need a couple of days to make the shift to this sleep time.”

  She nodded sleepily and yawned again. “If you do go out, don’t go beyond the inside of the dorm, though. It’s a rule that pairs should do everything together.” Again a yawn.

  “That’s all right. Til be good,” I assured her good-naturedly. “I have a good teacher.”

  I let her crawl into bed and she was soon fast asleep. I did not go out, at least not then. Instead I just lay there, thinking about all the new material I had to sort through, what I had learned, what I h
ad to work with, and what potentialities might be here for mischief.

  Ohing was going to be an invaluable asset at the start, that was for sure. She was smart, romantic, and a knowledgeable native guide. But in the long run she would be a problem. You can’t overthrow a system or set up the assassination of a Lord of the Diamond when you have for a constant companion someone raised always to believe in and trust in the system. As a romantic, she might easily wind up falling in love with me—which would be okay—but that would also mean that she might just turn me in to TMS for my own good.

  There were ways, although they’d take some time and ingenuity. But talk about long-range planning! The only way to separate Ching and myself, obviously, was to get her pregnant and stick her home with the kid. And I was only fourteen and a half years old and still technically a virgin…

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Friendly Chat with IMS

  My job was, in fact, as easy as Ching had made it out to be. Machines still did the real work—we just guided and directed them and made complete inspections of the passenger cars, buses, and train-crew quarters simply because humans will stick things and drop things and wedge things in places no machine would ever think of looking, let alone cleaning. How many times was I guilty of sticking stuff under a seat or between cushions just because it was convenient? It might be healthy if everyone had to spend a couple of months cleaning trains and buses before being allowed to ride them.

  Ching was so happy to have a friend at last and something solid to hang on to that she was far more pleasure than inconvenience. Hoping to get us involved in Guild hobbies and recreational activities, she took full advantage of our off time to show me the city and its services and frills, which were quite a bit more elaborate than I had expected.

  Gray Basin was nicely laid out once you understood the initial logic of it, and this, she assured me, was pretty much how all cities on Medusa were laid out, even the ones above ground. Just about everything was prefabricated, which allowed for expansion, change, and growth with a minimum of displacement and trauma. Everything, everywhere, just sort of fit together.

  There was theater, well-mounted if heavy on the musical fluff mixed with propaganda and duty to the State, and you could punch up an extensive library of books on your dorm terminal, even order a hard copy for delivery for a small sum. The books were heavy on technical and practical subjects and not much on literature and politics, for obvious reasons—no use contaminating fresh minds.

  Far less fettered were art galleries, which contained some of the finest human art and sculpture anywhere—no surprise, because most of them had been stolen from the best” museums of the Confederacy and were here more or less on protective loan. A substantial native art group was allowed to do just about anything without State interference as long as the themes weren’t political, at least, not political in a way that contradicted the official line. There was music, too, even an entire Medusan symphony orchestra—one of many, I was assured—that fascinated me by performing great compositions from man’s far past that I had never heard or heard of, as well as newer and more experimental stuff. I had to admit that, somehow, living people creating music was somehow better, more alive and pleasing, than the expert and flawless computer musicons I had grown used to in the Confederacy. The musicians had their own guild, headed by a woman who, it was said, had come to Medusa voluntarily. An expert musicologist and musician herself, she was an anachronism back in the Confederacy, but she had known Talant Ypsir and had joined him in exile when he offered the carrot of a real, primitive, wide-open musical program that would be planetwide.

  As for our own dorm, it had its own basic activities, and we had use of Guild common facilities like gyms and playing fields. A number of sports teams were organized around both intra-guild and inter-guild rivalries, and they certainly were a help both in meeting other people regardless of grade and for keeping in shape. In fact, the only Guild that didn’t seem to have teams or outside activities was TMS. I was told that they had tried it, once, in a campaign to give them a friendlier, more human face, but it had been a disastrous failure. You just can’t relax and have fun with a group whose members could do nasty things to you if you so much as protested a call.

  Besides, even TMS didn’t find it much of a challenge to win every game they played, no matter how lousy they’d played. So, they kept to themselves, being their normal prying, lousy selves, and everyone tried to ignore them as much as possible.

  In truth, working and playing with Ching, I almost did feel fourteen years old once again, and I really enjoyed it—but not to the point of not concentrating on my main task, which was to put together a plan that would eventually dispose of Talant Ypsir. I pretty much gave up my ideas of doing anything beyond that—although that was surely enough!—because of the restrictive nature of the society. They could be entertaining aliens and churning out humanoid superrobots in every third office building in Gray Basin, and I would neither know it or have any real way of finding out.

  Still, any move against the government of Medusa would have to be based upon what was, as of now, only a theoretical possibility. The society was locked in too tight, and was too well run, to do any real damage unless the monitor system could be negated. To do that, I would somehow have to learn if this malleability principle was really possible, and, if so, how to take advantage of it myself.

  Just how closely we were monitored was brought home at our every-other-week private sessions with a liaison between the Guild and TMS. We were generally asked to explain this or that action or comment we had made, often out in the open. I quickly understood that this was not really an inquiskion, nor were we accused of sedition or any sort of wrongdoing—it was merely a reminder that we were always observed, and, as such, better just start totally accepting Hie system and thinking and acting right at all times.

  Close to the end of my third month on Medusa I had become increasingly aware of changes in both Ching and myself—physiological changes that were hard to ignore. When I’d first met her, she’d been thin and spindly and, while cute, not really what you’d call well endowed. She was filling out now, and it didn’t take long to realize that this was no late pubescent growth but a direct Warden action in reaction to my stimulus. She was fast becoming an extremely sexy woman with all the right equipment. Clearly the hormonal triggers the Wardens employed to bring about the physical changes were also having the expected psychological effects.

  As for me, I was undergoing the same sort of transformation. I was filling out, becoming hard, lean, and muscular, sprouting body hair, and experiencing substantial sexual sensations. This helped my overall plan in the sense that I was beginning to look less like a fourteen-year-old kid. It also helped in that playing the role of the sexually repressed kid was driving me nuts anyway. Still, I was kind of nervous. It was within my acting abilities to simulate almost anything, but the role of a fourteen-year-old inexperienced virgin might well be beyond me. Fortunately, it was Ching who finally brought up the subject, and also allayed my real fears on that score.

  “Tarin?”

  “Uh huh?”

  “Do you feel—anything—when you look at me?”

  I thought a moment. “You’re a pretty girl and a good friend.”

  “No, I mean—well, beyond that. I do when I look at you most times. Real funny feelings, if you know what I mean.”

  “Maybe,” I answered cautiously.

  “Uh… Tarin? Have you ever… made love to a girl before?”

  I acted startled at the question. “I was twelve when they arrested me. When did I ever have a chance?” I hesitated a moment. “Have you?”

  She looked suitably shocked. “Oh, no! What do you think I am? A Goodtime Girl?”

  I laughed, walked over to her, and patted her soothingly. “Take it easy. So we’re both new at it.” Or very good liars, I thought. Still, she sounded sincere, which made the job much simpler. In a society where sex is generally available to all, one of the more boring thing
s is watching two people make it through some kind of closed-circuit hookup. Even if TMS got their jollies that way, we’d be such a small and uninteresting lot considering the whole population it would hardly be worth noticing. But if she were experienced, she could tell.

  And so, finally, tentatively, we made love, and that was a real mental release for me. As for Ching, she was in fact awkward and inexperienced and the whole thing was new to her, but she wound up with a happy and radiant high the likes of which I’d never seen before. In the days that followed the psychological changes in her were incredible. She was happier, far more self-confident, and given to spontaneous and automatic displays of affection, even on the job. This was a bit embarrassing at times; I wasn’t used to such displays, let’s face it, nor to any kind of attachment. I’d always been a loner and proud of it—you had to be in my kind of business.

  But we had sex a lot, which only reinforced everything.

  On a different note, I found an electronics hobby club sponsored by the Guild, and actively joined it. It occurred to me that this was the best way I had to see the engineering philosophy behind Medusa’s society, and it would give me access to the tools to counter that technological threat when the time finally came.

  That time was bothering me, though. Here it was three months along and I was really not ready to begin. I was still outside the establishment, still denied the tools and positions I needed, and even more cemented into the fairly pleasant daily regimen of low-grade Guild work. I had as much information and as much access to tools and technology as I needed to perform my duties, and I would get no more without some really dramatic or radical changes, changes I simply could not initiate.

  Interestingly enough, TMS provided me with the kick in the rear I needed. We were returning from work one day, holding hands and talking about nothing much, coming across the street from the bus stop to the dorm, when a small vehicle pulled up across the street and its driver looked over at us. Now, individual vehicles were rare enough to cause attention and apprehension, and there was no mistaking the military green of the woman at the controls or that look of inner power on her face.