Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail (10 page)

“How old are you?” she asked. “They told me you were young, but I figured you’d be my age.”

My eyebrows rose. “How old
are
you?”

“Sixteen two weeks ago,” she told me proudly. “That’s when I started work here.”

“Well, I’m close to fifteen,” I answered her initial question, stretching the truth a bit. There’s far less of a gap between fifteen and sixteen than between fourteen and sixteen. I wanted to press a bit further on her comment, though. “Who told you about me? And how come you and me are together here?”

She sighed. “They really didn’t tell you
anything,
did they? Okay, three weeks ago I was just graduated and still in Huang Bay—that’s way south of here—with my family. I knew I was going to get assigned soon, though, and, sure enough, my orders came through. I was inducted into the Transport Guild and sent here to start work. About a week ago I was called down to the Supervisor’s office and told that I was being paired with one Tarin Bul, a young man sent here from Outside, and that the two of us would work as a pair thereafter. They also told me you’d have some ideas and ways I might find strange—and that’s certainly true. In fact, all this is still a little strange to me, although it’s the same kind of setup I grew up in. My assignment’s inside, though, and away from the water.”

“Huang Bay’s on the equator, then?” I knew where it was exactly thanks to the handy map in my head, but it was a logical question.

She nodded. “Nearly, anyway. It’s a lot prettier than here, with all sorts of flowers and trees. Not that this is really bad, though. No animal or insect problems, and the fruit’s fresher.” She paused a moment. “Still, I kind of miss home and family and all that.”

I understood perfectly. Although I’d never been raised in any sort of family atmosphere, or had any close personal attachments, I could well see how someone who had been would be very lonely and homesick in this situation. That she accepted the wrench in her life so unquestioningly, said something important about the society. That wrench also explained why she was glad to see me.

We put our trays in the disposal, dropped the laundry by the small window that now had a uniformed attendant, then went back upstairs. We would see the rest of the place later; now it was time to get to know each other better, and for me to start learning the rules.

Apparently once the .door was activated by a card the first time it opened when it recognized you, because the room door slid back and we walked in. First Ching checked the room terminal, then, finding it still blank, sank back down on the bed and looked at me. It was far too soon for me to do anything but sit on the other. I didn’t wait for an opening, though.

“You said downstairs that we were paired—does that mean what I think it does?” I asked her.

“Depends on what you think it means. Everybody’s paired who hasn’t started or joined a family group. From here on in, we do everything together. Eat, sleep, go out, work—even our cards have identical account codes, so we can spend each other’s money.”

I gave a wan smile. “What if we don’t get along?”

“Oh, we will. The State ran us through a lot of checks with their big computers and came up with us. The State doesn’t make mistakes.”

I certainly hoped that wasn’t true; frankly, I knew it wasn’t. But what the hell. “That might be true for native-born Medusans, but they can’t know as much about me as they do about somebody born and raised here.” And how! At least—I hoped not.

She seemed upset. “You mean you don’t like me?”

“Now, I didn’t say that. I think I could learn to like you a lot, but I don’t really know you yet, and you don’t know me. And I don’t know Medusa at all—which should be obvious.”

My seeming honesty calmed her a little. “I guess you’re right. But there’s so little
to
know about Medusa.”

“That’s only because .you were born and raised here. What you take for granted I don’t recognize at all. This pairing, for example—is it always a girl and a boy?”

My question got her giggling a bit again. “That’s silly. You put
any
two in a pair and one of ‘em’s gonna be a girl.”

“How’s that?” Now I was genuinely confused. There was something here I was missing, and it was tough to find.

She sighed and tried to summon patience without sounding patronizing, but she didn’t quite make it. “I still don’t see what your problem is. I mean, I was a boy once myself and it was no big thing.”

“What!”
But with my surprise came the dawn, and with a lot more gingerly asked half-questions I managed to find the key. The key was the basic Warden precept on Medusa: survival.

Unlike the rest of the Warden Diamond, on Medusa the Warden organism was not all-pervasive. It depended upon the living creatures, plant and animal, of Medusa for its survival. On places like Lilith and Charon the little buggers were in the rocks and trees and everything, but here they concentrated only on animal life forms—and they changed those life forms to insure their own survival. That meant Wardens couldn’t reproduce beyond their host’s capacity without deforming that host and making the host less likely to survive in general. Thus, there was a premium on making certain that the bisexual humans—and animals, too, it seemed—reproduced as well.

Children were born basically neuter, although physiologically they would be classed as female, I suppose. When puberty hit, between ten and thirteen years of age, they acquired sexual characteristics based on the group with which they lived and with whom they most frequently associated. The vast majority, perhaps seventy-five percent, of the people of Medusa were female since you needed more females than males to assure regular reproduction.

Frankly, I hadn’t been out in Medusan society enough for this concept to have sunk in, but, thinking back to the groupings on the buses and even in the caféteria, it
had
seemed that there were an awful lot of women. …

“Let me get this straight,” I said at last, trying to sort things out. “If we were to, say, join one of these group families, and it already had its share of men, I might change sex?”

She nodded. “Sure. Happens all the time. Nobody thinks much of it, really.”

“Well,
I
do,” I told her. “Everywhere else, even in the Diamond, I’m told, if you’re born male you stay male and if you’re born female you stay female. This system is going to take some getting used to.”

The sociological implications were staggering, but beyond that it raised a broader question: if the Warden organism could undertake as major a change as
that
in, apparently, a very short .time, what else could it do? The potential was there for making Medusans totally self-determining malleables—if they could control the Wardens, rather than being controlled by them. If that were somehow possible, you could literally change your appearance by willpower, become anybody—or the semblance of anything—you wanted. I raised the possibility with her.

“There’re always stories about that sort of stuff, like out with the Wild Ones, but nobody I know has ever seen it. Not because you
order
it, anyway. Sometimes that kind of thing just
happens,
but it’s nothing anybody can control.”

The whole idea excited me. Anything that can just happen can somehow be controlled, particularly on a world with computers, psychs, and other modern mind- and body-control techniques. I would bet my life that Ypsir either had top researchers working on it or else had already figured out the means to do it. Of course, if that were true then you couldn’t trust anybody’s appearance. But I could understand why the ability would be very sparingly used and the very idea of it tightly suppressed, even ridiculed. A total society of malleables would bring this totalitarian state crashing down easily. I was beginning to see some possibilities here after all. But I couldn’t dwell on the subject. Not now, particularly.

‘The Wild Ones? Who are they?’

“Crazy people,” she told me. “Savages. They live out there in the wild, outside the State. They’re a pretty primitive, pitiful bunch, very superstitious and spending all their time just staying alive. I know—I’ve seen some of “em.”

I frowned, more interested than puzzled, but appearances were everything in this business. “But where did they come from? I mean, are they exiles from the State? Castoffs? Runaways? What?”

She shrugged. “Nobody’s sure, but they’ve been there since before the State was even founded. Most likely they’re the descendants of early settlers, explorers, or whatever, who got cut off from civilization.”

I didn’t really believe that, but I
could
believe they were people—and the children and grandchildren of people—who just couldn’t abide the State and its increasing control and had opted out. I had no doubt they were as primitive as Ching described them—this was a hard, nasty world—but some would consider that life preferable to this fishbowl existence. It was handy to know they were there, and helpful, too, to know that the Medusan State extended only to the cities, towns, and transport networks and left most of the rest of the planet wild and free. I didn’t particularly like the idea of grubbing in snow for branches and roots, but knowing this gave me an option—and on Medusa, right then, I badly needed options of any kind, even unappealing ones.

I turned the conversation back to Ching. Best not to dwell on anything of real interest, lest unseen watchers grow suspicious. There would be plenty of time to extract additional information in bits and pieces.

“How come you’re here in a basic job?” I asked her. “I
know
why I’m here—I don’t quite fit anyplace right now, and won’t until I’m older. But you were born here. What kind of job is it you have, anyway?”

She was more comfortable on this subject. “I—we—clean and restock trains and occasionally buses. It’s pretty easy work, really.”

I was surprised again. “Don’t they have robots to do that sort of thing?”

She giggled yet again. “No, silly! Oh sure, they use industrial robots a lot, but in complicated passenger places like trains and buses it takes a human to clean up after another human. Besides, the State doesn’t believe that just because a machine
can
do a job it is good or healthy for machines to do it.”

That sounded like a recitation of holy writ, but it was okay with me. We were both janitors—so what? But she hadn’t answered my. first question.

“You’re a smart girl,” I told her, only partly flattering her, “and you speak very well. You have an educated vocabulary. So how come you’re down here with us low-graders?”

She sighed and looked a little uncomfortable.

“If you’d rather not tell me, I will understand,” I said soothingly.

“No, it’s all right. I’m adjusted to it now. And yes, you’re right, they say my IQ’s way up there—but it’s not much good to me. You see, back a long time ago, maybe when I was born or even before, something funny happened in my head. They say it’s like a short circuit in an electrical line, only the affected area is so tiny they can’t find it and fix it. In most things I’m just as normal as anybody else. But when I look at words, or bunches of letters, they get all mixed up, somehow.” She pointed to the computer terminal. “I can do fine on that thing with voxcoder. But I look at the keys and they all just sorta run around in my head. I can understand the voice fine, but I get all mixed up when anything’s printed on the screen.” She shook her head sadly and sighed once more. “So you’re looking at the smartest illiterate on Medusa, I guess.”

I could understand her problem—and the State’s. In a technological society, it was necessary to know how to read. No matter how you cut it, it was necessary to read the repair manuals, or trace an engineering diagram, or follow procedures for getting out of a burning building. On any of the civilized worlds she might have been treated, although this sort of thing—“dyslexia,” it was called—had never been wiped out. Still, it didn’t quite make sense to me, considering the holy Wardens.

“How come the Wardens don’t fix it?” I asked her. “I thought nobody gets sick or has problems.”

She shrugged. “The experts they sent me to say it’s because I was born with it. Maybe it was the way I was made up, and the Wardens think that’s the way I should be. They finally said that even if they found it and fixed it my Wardens would probably un-fix it, ‘cause they think the way it is, is the way it should be. I learned to accept my handicap, but it drove me crazy, mainly ‘cause I was smarter than most of them who got good test grades and are now in school working toward good jobs.”

I could sympathize with her on several counts. Anybody could sympathize with the frustration of being smart and also restricted, but I realized that this Warden business was kind of tricky on birth defects. It proved to me that only genetically engineered humans were truly moral or practical—not that I needed any proof, since I was the product of genetic engineering myself and so was Tarin Bul.

“So does that mean you’re stuck being a waitress or janitor or something else like that?” I asked her. “Doing those jobs machines can’t or don’t do but which require no reading?”

“Oh, I can do a little better than that, if I prove it,” she answered confidently. “After all, if I can
talk
to a computer and the computer can
talk
back I can still use it okay. But, yeah, you’re right. Beyond a certain point there are lots of jobs I
could
do but literate persons could do a little faster or more efficiently, so they get the jobs. But that’s not what I’m supposed to do anyway, after a while. Why do you think they paired us, anyway?”

I thought a moment. “Because neither of us fit?”

She laughed at that. “No—well, maybe. I hadn’t thought of that. But eventually we’re supposed to found a family group. I’ll be the Base Mother—I’ll maintain the house and take care of the kids. And I’ll be able to teach ‘em when they’re young, and nobody’s gonna mind if I need a vox to do the budget. It’s not so bad. Better than being in a deadend job, or any of the alternatives, like being a Goodtime Girl or working the mines of the moons of Momrath.”