It suddenly occurred to me that the only real difference that probably existed between me and this Lord of the Diamond was that I was working for the law and he—or she—against it. But no, that wasn’t right, either. On his world he was the law and I would be working against it. Perfect again. Dead heat on moral grounds.
The only thing that really bothered me was the disadvantage of not having a psychoprogram with everything I needed to know all neatly laid out for me in my mind. Probably, I thought, they hadn’t done it this time because they’d had me on the table in four new bodies with four separate missions, and the transfer process to a new body was hard enough without trying to add anything afterward. Still, the omission put me in a deep pit. I sure hoped that the rest of that contact briefing recording hadn’t wiped when I’d gotten up. It would be all I had.
Food came—a hot tray of tasteless muck with a thin plastic fork and knife that would dissolve into a sticky puddle in an hour or so, then dry up into a talclike powder. Standard for prisoners.
This being my first meal in some time, it wasn’t long before I had to go once again, and so I faced convincingly my moment of truth with the toilet that talked.
“Now, as to this process”—Krega’s voice, picking up right where we left off, gave me a tremendous feeling of relief—“we had to brief you this way because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Don’t worry about it, though—it’s permanent. We just prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock. Besides, we haven’t the time to allow you to completely ‘set in,’ as it were. This will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel you have the trickiest task of the four.”
I felt the old thrill creep in. The challenge… the challenge!
“As I said, your objective world is Cerberus. Like all the Diamond colonies, Cerberus is a madhouse. Third out from the Warden sun of the four Warden worlds, it is subject to seasons and ranges from a tropical equatorial zone to frozen polar caps. The most peculiar thing from a physical standpoint about the world is that it is a water world with no above-surface land masses. It is, however, a world abundant in life. The geological history is unknown, but apparently the sea covering was quite stow and the massive numbers of plants in its distant geological past kept their heads above water, so to speak. Thus almost half of the surface is covered with giant plants interwoven into complex networks, some with trunks tens of kilometers around—necessary support, since they are rooted in the seabed from a hundred meters to an impossible two to three kilometers below. The cities and towns of Cerberus are built atop these plants.
“No additional physical descriptions will be adequate, and you will be well briefed below by the governing officials upon landing. However, we feel a complete physical-political map would be useful and are thus going to imprint that map on your mind now.”
I felt a sharp back pain, then a wave of dizziness and nausea that quickly cleared. Whereupon I found that I did in fact have a detailed map of the entirety of Cerberus in my head. It would be very handy. There followed a fast stream of facts on the place. It was roughly 40,000 kilometers around the equator, and its gravity was 1.02 norm, so close I’d hardly notice it. Equatorial and summer temperatures were a pleasant 26 to 27 degrees centigrade, mid-latitude spring and fall were between 12 and 13 degrees centigrade, chilly but not uncomfortable, and polar regions and mid-latitude winters could drop as low as 25 below, although the sea cover and the location of settlements along warm currents that the great plants also followed usually kept it well above that and relatively ice-free even in the worst of times.
A day was 23.65 standard hours, close enough to cause no major disruptions in my biological schedule, a pretty normal environment—if you liked water, anyway.
Cerberus was industrialized—I could hardly wait to see factories in the treetops—but lacked heavy metals or easily obtainable hard resources of any sort. Most of its ore and other needed industrial materials came from Medusa in exchange for finished goods, and from mines on the many moons of a gas giant much farther out. While technological, the Confederacy kept close tabs on what was built on Cerberus, and the industry, though good, was forcibily kept in obsolete channels. In effect this was the best of news, since there wouldn’t be a machine on Cerberus I didn’t know intimately or couldn’t get complete details on from above. To ensure some technological retardation, there was the Warden organism, whose fancy name nobody used or remembered. It got into literally everything, right down to the molecules in a grain of sand, and it resisted “imported” materials—that is, materials that did not also have Warden organisms inside. Thanks to early exploration spreading the contagion from Lilith, this meant not only the four Warden worlds but, to my surprise, the seven barren but mineral-rich moons of the ringed giant Momrath, outside the zone of life. For some reason the Warden bug could still live were no others could, even way out there, but no further. Beyond Momrath the things died as they did going out-system.
“The Lord of Cerberus is Wagant Laroo,” Krega’s voice went on. “He was an important Confederacy politician until about thirty years ago, when he grew too ambitious and forgot his sacred oaths, taking his sector from the paths of civilization into his own private kingdom. As befitted his position and former contributions to the Confederacy, he was given the option of death or Warden exile; he chose the latter. He is a megalomaniac with delusions of godhood, but do not underestimate bun. He has one of the most brilliant organizational minds the Confederacy ever produced, and it is coupled with total amorality and absolute ruthlessness. His power and rule extend far beyond Cerberus, for many antisocials within the Confederacy use Cerberus as a storehouse for hidden records, location of loot, and even the storage of blackmail. I fear I must warn you that, if the impossible happened and there was some sort of leak about you, he will know of it. No security is perfect, and this possibility must be considered.”
I nodded to myself. Despite Krega’s patriotic phrasing, few if any top Confederacy politicians were immune to scandal or blackmail on some level, and this guy was a master.
“Finding Laroo might well be impossible,” Krega warned. “Cerberus has the Warden organism, but it is a mutated strain. More of this will be explained on orientation, but you must trust to the fact that bodies are as interchangeable as clothes on Cerberus. So even if you saw Laroo, had him pointed out to you and shook his hand, you could not be absolutely certain it was really he, and even less certain that it would still be he days, hours, even minutes later.”
That didn’t really bother me much. For one thing, if Laroo had this kind of dictatorial control somebody always had to know who he was or he couldn’t give the orders and expect to be obeyed. Furthermore, a man like that would love the actual trappings and exercise of power. Then too, Laroo couldn’t be at all certain who I might be a few minutes, days, or weeks later, either.
“At last count there were approximately 18,700,000 people on Cerberus,” Krega went on. “This is not a large population, but it has a very high growth rate. There are more jobs and space than people even now. Since the advent of Laroo’s rule the population has been expanding at a rate that almost doubles it every twenty years or so. We believe that only part of this population push is economic, though. Much of it, we think, is because, on a world of body switchers, the potential for immortality exists if there is a constant and available supply of young bodies. Laroo seems to have some control over this process, which is the ultimate political leverage. Naturally, this also means that, short of being killed, Laroo could literally rule forever.”