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.”