02. The Shadow Dancers (10 page)

And then he started puttin' me in his machines. They didn't hurt none, but sometimes they used drugs and sprays that might have hid just about anything. They was
fast,
though. I got the feelin' that if I broke my leg in the mornin' I'd walk out whole in the afternoon.

At the end of three days, Sam, who'd been spendin' his time with planners for the mission, was a little uncomfortable. I was changin' more than either of us bargained for. For the first time in my life, my hair was straight and silky-black like it'd been born that way, and it was growin' at one hell of a rate. By the end of five days my hair was thick and down below my shoulders and was just as big a pain to comb and wash as I always figured. It
really
changed my appearance, I'll tell you. My skin was a little lighter and almost a uniform chocolate brown. A couple of old scars and lots of stretch marks were gone; so was my vaccination scar, and my skin was a little oilier, almost shiny. I was also gettin' thinner, back in shape. The doc said the machines
used my own body to do and lock in a lot of the changes, and that it took from the too fat parts. Not that I was skinny-but she wasn't, neither. Still, every time I looked in the mirror it was some strange girl starin' back.

It got worse, though, when the dental stuff started. I had more than a few fillin's, and they was wrong and had to go. They put me under with somethin', and when I woke up 1 was almost a stranger. The stuff in my teeth, and one or two new teeth, now felt a little dead in my mouth, like caps might, but there was no way by lookin' or even X ray to tell that them teeth weren't the way nature intended. My nose looked different, and so did my smile. My round face seemed a little more oval. I also always had a deep voice, but they tuned it a bit-it sounded funny when I talked, a little higher and a lot huskier. The new face also done somethin' to the way I could talk, too. I had real trouble with
s
and
r
sounds; it was a hell of a lisp. Still, in only five days, when he took another picture of me and put it next to that one of the other girl and I stepped away and looked, we was close. Damned close. It was more the way she held herself, and that idiot's smile on her, than anything you could measure.

"You thure you can change thith all back?" I asked him worriedly. "I nevah thought 'bout thith kinda thuff when I took the job."

"In the same five days," he assured me. "Except for the lost body weight, of course. That you will have to replace yourself, if you want to."

"I thure don' wanna talk like thith the west of my life."

Sam couldn't help but make fun of the lisp till he saw how self-conscious I was about it; then he stopped. "Remember, you agreed to do this," he said. "You don't like the price you paid so far-and neither do I-but this is the easy part."

"I know, I know," I grumbled. "I already got to the point where I just wanna get goin' and get thith over with."

I think what disturbed him most was the last thing they did. It was on the inside of my left palm, and it was nothin' more than a long number tattooed there in purple ink. Sam had an uncle and a coupla cousins with numbers like that, souvenirs of Hitler's camps.
And, in the end, that was the bottom line of what was buggin' him. This world I was gonna get dropped in was a Nazi world, a world where the Jews had been wiped out and
we
was the new Jews. It was like I was volunteerin' to be a Jew at Auschwitz. That didn't set none too well with me, but none of
them
had Sam just outside holdin' a gun on G.O.D., Inc.

Not that I wasn't startin' to get nervous. I was. The closer the dates came, the more doubts I had, the more second thoughts, and the scareder I got. I began to really wonder if Sam was right all along. I wasn't no Cleopatra Jones, no Jane Bond. Undercover was always the hardest and riskiest thing any investigator could do, and this was undercover in a whole
world
that considered me no better than a pet monkey and would treat me the same or worse.

Then we started through the simulation exercises. They had a room in the big house rigged up kinda like they thought Vogel's Safe Room was-but they wasn't sure- complete with secret passage, and they took me in there naked and in light but limiting arm and leg chains to where a big guy about Vogel's size and weight played the mark. The first three days of this, twenty times a day with analysis, I never even come
close
to takin' him, and I got
real
discouraged. Still, every time I blew it they took me aside, showed me a recordin' of the whole thing, and explained what I done wrong, what tricks I fell for, what opportunities I missed. I learned quick-this was my ass on the line, and I wanted to live to spend that bread. By the fourth day of trainin', I took not only the fellow playin' Vogel but two other guys even bigger and meaner about half the time. By the time there was only two days left, I was takin' all comers in that room three out of four times.

It wasn't good enough, but it had to do.

We also had all sorts of briefin's, goin' on and on and makin' us all memorize everything till we talked it in our sleep. Timing, other things, and most important the emergency procedures in case it went down wrong. I knew just what was gonna happen when and if, and there were only a few things they didn't tell me, 'cause if
I
didn't know then I couldn't be made to tell Vogel.

That night, we got dressed up in fancy-colored silks for
the last real night we'd have until it was over. The way I talked, the last thing I wanted was guests and a dinner party, but this weren't no last meal. The ones comin' to dinner were the folks with the five million bucks-the Security Committee.

"You got to do all the talkin'," I told Sam. "I couldn't open my
mouth
'round nobody now."

"Yeah, well, I'll try, but you're what they've come to see and neither Aldrath nor I like it much."

"Huh?"

"Babe, these guys dreamed up this thing and passed the job of actually doing it down to Aldrath, who passed it on to Bill and then to us, but until now it's just an abstract thing to them. Beyond Bill, Aldrath, Jamispur, and a tight circle of security personnel who have their brains laundered every morning to make sure they're secure, nobody knows who is doing this, or when, or anything else. Now all of a sudden the whole damned committee shows up and demands to meet with us. They're all corporate class people- untouchable even by Aldrath unless he catches them with a smoking gun in their hands standing over a freshly dead body. They're all ambitious up-and-coming corporate types, sort of like Congressmen. They're a potentially leaky bunch and you can do a lot in forty-eight hours."

"But thurely the Thecurity Committee is checked out!" Trouble was, I was startin' to get used to talkin' like a black Elmer Fudd.

"People leak things for their own advantage. If one of 'em gets concerned with a bigwig he's trying to impress and gets pressed on what's being done about this security threat, he might blurt it all out just to make an impression, or leak it if there's rumors going around that he hasn't been very effective. Now, we're going to block out that whole time line from the Labyrinth, so nobody and no messages go in or out until you're safe, and anybody who leaves here not on our team will be monitored like a hawk, but these are big shots used to intelligence work. It's an extra added pain in the ass."

I couldn't help but notice that the Security Committee was all male. In fact, I found out when I pressed, just about all the senior officers were men. It wasn't that this place was
out-and-out sexist, but women somehow never made it to the top spots. Some of it was that these guys tonight were mostly in their seventies and maybe had a hundred years or more before there was much of an openin', and the Chairman of the Board, they said, was a hundred and five and nowhere near retirin', but I think there was more. This sorta trickles down, too. If women aren't in top spots, they don't tend to be treated as good further down. Kinda like Russia, where all women are equal and work at jobs, but never get high up in the government 'cept as the head of culture or arts or somethin' like that, and are still expected to come home nights and clean house and cook dinner.

Here, nobody really
had
to work, and a lot of women didn't, stayin' home with the kids and stuff. Lots of the artists were women, I found out, and dancers and entertainers, and lots in the common classes had all sorts of regular jobs, but almost never on top unless they was the absolute best. Nobody seemed to care 'bout this, though. They all had one of them religions that believed in reincarnation, and you was a man one life, a woman the next, and so on. Me, I was thinkin' I might like to be a housewife and full-time mother to some kids, 'specially if I had lots of money, but I sure as hell would hate to be
required
to do that.

They trooped in, one at a time, and got greeted like one of them diplomatic receptions. More of them beautiful golden people, all of 'em, only Iookin' a little older and maybe a little shiftier, like politicians or salesmen. Mayar Eldrith, our host, was tall and strong and real slick lookin'; he brought his wife, Eyai, who looked somethin' like some Hawaiian goddess. She had that special smile and way of talkin' that all politicians' wives seem to have, and Mayar talked like he was some big shot Senator runnin' for office. Real smooth voice and delivery.

He was followed by Hanrin Sabuuk, who looked and sounded enough like Mayar to be his brother, then Dringa Lakuka, who looked older and wiser and was a real quiet type but with real bright eyes. You got the feelin' he was some god slummin' and havin' a ball doin' it. Then there was Basuti Alimati, the youngest and newest member- only fifty-seven and lookin' a good thirty-who seemed real
stuffy and businesslike. They told us he was the only one of them who never married and never seemed to fool around, neither. They wasn't very hung up on sex here-you could have as many wives, or even husbands, as you could talk into it, swing with either or both sexes, and have unlimited lovers on the side. This guy, though, was never even known to swing with himself.

The last one and just slightly older than "young" Basuti, was Mukasa Lamdukur. He looked much like the others and was maybe the most human of the bunch, and he was the only one who brought along others, much to Sam's and Aldrath's distress. They looked so young I figured it was his kids, but they weren't. Mukasa's job was keepin' the records straight and generally runnin' the committee on a day-today basis, and Dakani Grista, a real young hunk of a boy, and Ioyeo, who was a little small as the women went here and looked maybe sixteen or so, were the administrative assistants, or so we were told. Only Dakani was of the manager class, though; Ioyeo (their women never seemed to have but one name, all vowels-I guess it was the way things was translated) was actually a commoner class person whose big talent was that she was oversexed and net real bright. She had one
hell
of a figure, though, and that sari looked painted on, and I guess that's one of the things they wanted around the office. Even on a world of beautiful women, she was a real stunner, and she even had one of them dumb blond voices-you know, high-pitched as all get-out and whispery to boot-and all the right moves. I had to poke Sam more than once that night to get his mind back where it should be.

They all treated her kinda like some servant, though, but she fetched and smiled and giggled and didn't seem to mind. I couldn't help thinkin' that if there was a leak or a traitor at the top, that's the one I'd look first at. Nobody was like that in real life.

The talk was mostly small talk, and I did almost none of it.

"So, tell me, what's your world like?" Mayar Eldrith asked Bill Markham.

"A stroke seven world, sir," Bill replied pleasantly.

"Oh, yes-atomic weapons, superpowers, big and little
wars," Mukasa put in. "An interesting world. Not at all boring."

Bill choked down what he might really wanna say. "Yes, sir, it is definitely interesting. You've been to a stroke seven?"

Mukasa chuckled. "Long ago, when I was very young. They were fighting a big conventional war then, and there were lots of diseases and abysmal ignorance about them. I remember that. I suppose it must have been your world, since that's the only stroke seven we've developed for many years so far. Who won that war, anyway?"

"Depends on which one it was. If it was a world war, then it was probably the U.S., England, and Russia against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The U.S. side won. Now they and the Germans, Italians, and Japanese are on the same side and the Russians on the other."

"Fascinating," Hanrin put in. "I should like to see a full-blown war one day-from a safe distance, of course."

"They're very destructive and not very pretty or glamorous," Sam couldn't help but put in. "In fact, they're the ugliest side of human nature."

"Perhaps, but they are incredibly valuable. Progress and inventiveness accelerate a hundredfold during a war. Most great inventions and ideas come out of them, you know. I fear it is the nature of the human beast and just as necessary to him as love."

"I notice there haven't been any wars here," Sam noted, a little ticked off at this.

Mayar Eldrith sensed Sam's irritation. "Come, come! Yes, you're right, we don't have wars here, but we're a pretty static culture because of it. Our progress comes from what we learn from others. Still, we are not ignorant of the horrors and cost of wars. The Labyrinth came out of a war, in fact-the last war fought on this Earth between our people. In point of fact, it was terribly ugly. It destroyed in the end all human life on this planet. Only a small band of brave pioneers managed to escape through the Labyrinth, a very primitive thing then, and wait it out. When they were at last able to return, they found a wasteland. All that you see-the animals, trees, flowers, everything-they imported from other worlds. They redesigned the entire
planet into a garden, and they swore that never again would violence sear us. Out of that came the Corporation and the system we now have."