Jack L. Chalker - X 3 - Cerebus - A Wolf in the Fold
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Cerberus: A Wolf in the FoldCerberus: A Wolf in the Fold
A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1981 by Jack L. Chalker
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House,
Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 81-67840
ISBN 0-345-31122-1
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: January 1982 Third Printing: April 1983
Cover art by David B. Mattingly
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.
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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,
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and the tray became the centerpiece on an elegant, modern dining table. He then
lifted the cover, and she gasped and smiled 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
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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
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
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anxious.
"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 ...
In a system based on perfect order, uniformity, and harmony, the Warden Diamond
was an insane asylum. Halden Warden, a Confederacy scout, had discovered the
system well over two centuries earlier. Warden himself was a legend for the
number of planets he had discovered, but was considered something of a nut, even
for the sort of men and women who preferred to spend most of their time alone
among uncharted stars. He loved his work, but he considered discovery his
function, leaving just about everything else for those who would follow. He
paused only long enough to take positions and beam back the information in as
terse a form as possible. The trouble was, he was usually so terse people
couldn't figure out what he meant until they got there—and for the Warden
Diamond he was in top form.
His initial signal was a seemingly simple "4AW." The meaning of this signal was
far from simple—it was impossible. It meant a single solar system with four
inhabitable worlds, a statistical near impossibility in a galaxy in which only
one out of four thousand solar systems contained anything remotely of use. ,It
was Warden, though, who had found the impossible and named them. His entire
report was pretty characteristic of his worst. Charon—looks like Hell.
Lilith—anything that pretty's got to have a snake in it. Cerberus—looks like a
real dog. Medusa—anybody who lives here would have to have rocks in his head.
And that was it That, the coordinates, and the caution "ZZ," which meant that
there was something about the place he didn't like but that he couldn't put his
finger on. Dangerous—proceed with extreme caution.
When the first party, armed to the teeth, reached it, they immediately perceived
what spooked Warden beyond the existence of the incredible four planets. They
seemed to be at right angles to each other around their F-type star.
It turned out, of course, that this configuration was a freak occurrence—nobody
since has seen the Diamond form as perfectly as Warden when he discovered it,
and there was really nothing unnatural about such once-in-a-lifetime
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configurations, but the early name stuck. The Warden Diamond.
An enormous amount of space junk was in the system —asteroids, comets, you name
it, as well as the usual gas giants—but the second through fifth planets were
what held everyone spellbound. Each was within the life zone for temperature;
all had atmospheres of nitrogen and oxygen, all had water.
Charon, at 158.551 million kilometers from its sun, was a hot, steamy jungle
world with bubbling mud and horrible heat and humidity. The dominant life form
seemed to be large reptilian creatures that resembled the smaller dinosaurs.
Indeed, the planet did look like some visions of hell.
Lilith, at 192.355 million kilometers, was an Eden, a warm paradise all over.
Heavily forested, and rich in a variety of plant life, the planet was inhabited
by insects from very small to tremendous. The fruit proved edible, the grasses
versatile, and even the insects were sources of protein. It was a paradise, all
right, with nary a snake in sight. Yet.
Cerberus, at 240.161 million kilometers, was colder, harsher, and the strangest
of the four. It appeared to be covered by an enormous deep ocean without any
land masses. However, the ocean was covered by a dense growth of plants so
gigantic they rose more than two or three kilometers from the seabed to the
surface and beyond, forming a riot of colors and supporting a surface plant
ecosystem growing on the tops of the great plants themselves. You could build
cities in those treetops, and, in the temperate zones, live very comfortably
from a climate point of view. But with natural resources other than wood so far
out of sight as to be unreachable if available at all and with such an odd place
for living, the planet was something of a dog as far as possible settlement was
concerned.
Finally there was Medusa, at 307.768 million kilometers, a cold, frozen world
dotted with a few forests but covered mostly with tundra and polar ice. The only
one of the four with obvious signs of volcanism, it was a hard, harsh land whose
only inhabitants seemed to be a mammalian assembly of Wandering herbivores
preyed upon by some particularly nasty-looking carnivores. Medusa was ugly,
bitter cold, and stark, compared not just to Lilith but to any of the others;
the early explorers had to agree that anybody who voluntarily went to such a
world to live and work would most likely have rocks in his head.
The Exploiter Team had chosen Lilith for its main base, naturally, and settled
in. Nothing happened for about six months, as they lived and worked and studied
under a rigid quarantine, although with their shuttlecraft they had established
preliminary camps on the other three worlds as well. They were just beginning to
relax when Lilith's snake struck.
By the time all their machinery had ceased to function it was already too late.
They watched first as the power drained out of all their equipment, then,
frantically, as that same equipment and all other offworld artifacts started to
break up into so much junk, rotting before their eyes. Within a week there was
simply no sign that anything alien to Lilith had ever been there; everything was
gone, even their clearings being overgrown with astonishing speed. Soon nothing
at all was left—nothing but sixty-two stunned, stark-naked scientists,
bewildered and scared half to death but without even the most elementary
equipment to explain to them that they hadn't all just gone stark staring mad.
The other worlds, too, had not escaped. All at one point had been on Lilith, and
they'd taken the snake back home with them to the other three planets. Finally,
using remote probes, the combined scientific studies of a major lab cruiser off
the planets found the culprit—an alien organism like nothing else ever seen.
Submicroscopic, it lived in colonies within the cells. Though not intelligent in
any human sense, it did seem to be able to enforce an amazing set of rules on an
entire planet, given an incredible capacity for evolving to meet any threat to
the ecosystem and subdue it. Living an entire life span in only three to five
minutes, its ability to evolve into whatever was necessary to obey its genetic
coding—to keep things as they were—was strong. Within six months the organism
had evolved enough to take care of the human interlopers, attacking and
corroding all non-native materials and permeating and establishing a symbiotic
relationship with the humans.
The other planets, however, held different fates for intruders. Different
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atmospheric balances, gravitational forces, radiation intensities—all sorts of
differences existed on each, so this bug, this submicroscopic life form, could
not change those worlds into Lilith. Instead, the organism changed. On Medusa it
adapted the host organism to the new environment, striking a balance that way.
On Charon and Cerberus it struck a balance within its hosts that was to its
liking but which caused bizarre side effects in those hosts.
Worse, the Warden organism seemed to have some sort of link to the solar system
of its origin. Remove someone infected by it and the Warden organism died—and
sadly, since the organism had modified every cell of the body to to its own
convenience, the host also died, horribly and painfully. Humans could live in
the Warden Diamond, even travel in-system, but they could never ever leave.
Many scientists devoted their lives and careers to the problem, deliberately
trapping themselves on the Warden worlds and establishing scientific colonies
still run by descendants. But the solution, in the main, defied them— which of
course only infuriated them and spurred them on all the more.
But it was not to be the scientists who would settle the bulk of the Diamond; it
was the criminal class. A Utopian system sophisticated enough to maintain a
frontier did not want to waste those people who had somehow found and exploited
flaws in their system. The cream of the criminal class in a technological
society was often the most brilliant and innovative, but such deviates could
hardly be allowed in the civilized worlds or even tolerated for long on the
frontier. Until the discovery of the Warden Diamond, these people had to be
eliminated for the good of the social order. Now it was possible to transport
this criminal elite, along with assorted political prisoners and other social
undesirables, to a place where they would be free to be their immoral or amoral
selves and still retain the inventiveness necessary to come up with something
the Confederacy could use.
The perfect prison. Only, of course, what that accomplished was to place the
most brilliant sociopathic—and psychopathic—minds together in one place, in
contact with one another. They and their descendants built empires. Each world
had unique attributes, held attractions for those the Confederacy and its
Assassins had not yet caught. Cash could be shunted away to Cerberan and Medusan
banks; loot of all kinds could be hidden forever on Charon or Cerberus until
needed. Even Lilith, which would tolerate nothing alien, was a true repository
for secrets channeled in and out of its protected orbital satellites to trusted
members of the Lilith hierarchy. The strongest, cleverest, and nastiest reached
the top and held power over planet-wide criminal syndicates whose influence
reached into the heart of the Confederacy. The heads of these syndicates called
themselves the Four Lords of the Diamond, and they were doing a nice job getting
even with the society that sent them there. Now they were working for an alien
enemy that had the potential to destroy the entire system, a fact the
Confederacy discovered very late in the aliens' game—and almost by accident
The humans had little defense, as the aliens surely had realized. Agents sent to
the Warden worlds faced almost certain death if discovered. If not, they were
stuck there along with the criminal lords and their descendants and subject
people. The situation tended to make keeping an agent loyal a big problem, since
there was nothing he or she could be offered as a reward and it was a lifetime
job. One such agent, a volunteer, became one of the Four Lords himself.
Yet the Confederacy's only link to the alien menace that might attack and
destroy them at any time was the Warden Diamond. They had to put not just agents
down there but their best—and they finally figured out a way to do it, more or
less. They took their best agent, an Assassin First Class of absolutely
impeccable loyalty and devotion, and then introduced him to the Merton Process,
by which the personality and memories of someone could be stored in a computer
and then fed into other bodies.
The original minds in those surrogate bodies were of course destroyed. Twenty or
thirty individuals died before a personality graft "took," but that was all
right—they were all antisocials anyway. Thus was their best agent "placed" into
four totally different bodies and dispatched to the four Warden worlds. Once
there, each had to act alone to find out what he could of the alien menace and,
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