Hocrow looked at me strangely for a moment. “Is what you told them about actually being a bred assassin true?”
“Yeah, it’s true. Big money was paid, too. I was a long-range hidden gun in a power play my father planned. They got the jump on him before he was ready or I was old enough to be a factor, and I admit I was too young—too emotional—then.”
“Then you wouldn’t avenge your father’s death if it happened now?”
“Oh, sure I would—but I wouldn’t have been caught.”
She mulled that over, just sitting there, looking up at the ceiling for quite some time. Finally she nodded to herself. “That’s what was bothering me so much about you before. It fits. It explains a lot.” She gave that icy smile again. “It seems you are misplaced. You should be in TMS.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I thought I was. Otherwise, what are we doing here?”
She sighed. “One thing does bother me. If you have your preliminary training and all that special design, how will we ever know which side you are really on?”
I chuckled. “No matter what, I have limited experience. If you and your entire staff of monitors, psychs, and the like can’t be sure of me, then your system’s too shaky to have any hope of long-term survival anyway. Either you can do the job or you should give it up.”
That was blunt, almost daring talk, but it was also guaranteed to play directly to a solid cop’s ego because, frankly, it was true. The fact that I was trained to beat any system didn’t mean I couldn’t be beat. It only meant they had to be up to the job.
“Now, what about this psych exam?” I asked her. “Can you get me by it?”
“It should be relatively easy for someone with your supposed abilities,” she mocked. “Still, we can do a little reinforcing before you leave here, with your help. I have a tech on call.”
“That’ll do,” I told her. “But you’re not going to do anything crazy like pick up any of the café staff, are you? They all have to be in on it, at least in another cell that supports mine. I’d just trail and track ’em, if possible. My own intention is to make myself invaluable enough to the organization that I’ll be passed ever upward. If everybody’s as amateurish as these people, you have no real problem, only an irritant. So what if they can play games with the system as long as they’re still trapped in it? But if, at the top levels, there’s somebody or some group really able to use what they’ve got, then I want to meet them.”
She looked at me with those steely eyes. “Why?”
I grinned. “Because I want your job. Because, maybe, I’d like to be First Minister before I’m forty. Or, maybe, the guy who tells the First Minister what to do.”
“Ambitious, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. “I’m young.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Working Both Sides of the Street
The psych job was no big problem. In fact, the hardest thing about it was not betraying how much more I knew about the tech’s machines than she did. Still, as someone allegedly under psych probes for over a year after the murder, I could be expected to have a certain amount of familiarity and expertise.
The routine psych exam was designed to catch problems before they developed into something that might cause real trouble for the Guild and the system. I did learn, by casual conversation while taking the exam, a bit of interesting additional information to file.
There was no psych school on Medusa; all psychs native to the Warden system were trained on Cerberus. It stood to reason, therefore, that this Opposition might also have Cerberan origins. I had no evidence, of course, but such a level of technological expertise combined with such an amateurish and naive set of people led to the inescapable conclusion that we—the Opposition, that is—were the arm of a widespread, Confederacy-backed underground whose main objective, at least on Medusa, was to get organized and remain in waiting until needed.
I got along well with the cell members, particularly once I disdained that silly robe, hood, and veil the rest of them used. Hell, they all knew who I was anyway, so why fool with that sort of stuff? To my disappointment, most of them were also in the Transport Guild—I wanted to broaden my base—although at least two were fairly high up. But they were such eager amateurs, that I felt I had to more or less lead them along and also maybe dangle some bait for the higher-ups. Therefore, at one meeting I dropped a real bombshell. They were doing their usual debating-society stuff about the problems in breaking the system as opposed to crawling around in the cracks when I interrupted. “I think I’m pretty clear on how to destroy totally TMS’s hold on Medusa.” All of a sudden you could have heard a pin drop.
“So? What master plot has the superkid come up with now?” one of them finally asked.
“Let me tell you about the harrar,” I began. “They’re too big not to eat all the time, and too big and fat ever to catch anything. Yet there are plenty of harrar in the wild. You remember some of the old wives’ tales about them?”
They nodded and shook their heads and mumbled and finally somebody said, “But nobody believes that crap.”
“On a world that’s been settled for this short a time, there’s almost always a good reason for those tales,” I pointed out. “And the harrar itself fits in perfectly. They can change shape. They can make themselves look like other, more familiar things and then just sit there until prey comes near. Maybe they even attract it. But they change shape all the same. On a more primitive basis, I think the tubros have a little of this ability as well. They have a tail that looks like their necks with a ball of fat on the end of it. Why? A neck with no head, or a ball of fat, isn’t going to fool any predator worth its. salt. I think they make that ball of fat look just like their pointy heads, when they have to. All of them change color to fit their background, as do almost all the animals on Medusa. Hell, even we do that, sort of.”
“But that’s animals,” somebody noted. “What’s that to do with us, even if it is true?”
“I think humans can do it, too. The fact is, the Warden cells that make-up our bodies are basic living cells for plants and animals. They’re not like normal human, plant, or animal cells, but they’re more like each other than like normal cells. They protect us from cold and heat and even from starvation, within limits. Given air and water we can live anywhere and on most anything if we had to. Nature is really pretty consistent. Shape-changing is simply a practical survival characteristic the Wardens could develop.”
“Then why can’t we do it?” somebody wanted to know.
“Because we don’t know how. I suspect that if we were out in the wild the ability would come more or less naturally. But it does exist, even here. I’ve seen scars heal almost while I was watching them. I’ve seen three people I knew change sex so absolutely you’d swear they were born with that new sex. If we can accomplish something that total, we can surely make changes with any face and form.”
“That may be,” Sister 657 put in, “but nobody can control these things so it does no one any good.”
“I think they can be controlled. I think the harrar and the tubros’ tail tell us it’s possible. With them it’s probably instinctive, but the ability is there. It’s only a matter of our finding out how to do it. I’m convinced the government knows. They went to a lot of trouble to suppress any idea that it’s possible because they know it is. Their system is one based on visual and audio surveillance. Anybody who looked and sounded just like somebody else could use the card of whoever they appeared to be. Replace somebody—almost anybody roughly your size—and you can walk where he or she would walk and the monitors would never pick up the substitution. A lot of TMS’s offices, for example, have no monitors themselves. The watchers don’t like to be watched, and they need a few places off the record sometimes. A relatively small group of malleable people could walk into TMS as prisoners and wind up replacing everybody in top authority. A coordinated effort could collapse the system beyond easy repair.”