Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail (22 page)

They remained silent—as if thinking about what I just said. They didn’t seem very surprised one way or the other about my assertion of controlled malleability. Finally the first woman said, “Foolish one! Do you not think your idea has not been thought of before? From the start it was the only reasonable course. But at the beginning we were disorganized, scattered refugees, without the numbers or abilities. An entire generation was mercilessly hunted all over the planet, and it learned how to survive—but in the wild. The next generation was born here and had nothing but what seemed like fanciful tales of magic. The generation after that, the current one, feels no kinship whatever to the city dwellers—they are demons. Now we have the numbers, but not the will. We built the culture that keeps them alive and holds them together, but it is a primitive one. If we had ten thousand, perhaps even five thousand, people like you four, perhaps we could do it. But the gap between your cultures and your minds and theirs is too great.”

I was not prepared to concede the point, but I was very interested in the implications of what she said. “Then controlled malleability is possible.”

They didn’t answer me; instead, the second woman asked, “Well, what are we to do with you, then? You will never fit into this culture. You will never accept it, and your efforts will bring the others down upon it. You cannot return to the cities. So for now, you will have to stay with us as our guests—but you will not disrupt the people or their customs or beliefs, understand? Until we decide what to do with you you are welcome to our hospitality. But we are perfectly willing, and capable, of terminating you as well. Do you understand?”

I nodded. “I think we do.”

“Then, for now, this audience is finished.” With that intonation a small boat appeared from the left inside the cave, showing just how you
did
get to the other side and in and out. The underground river, diverted through here, was apparently deep and navigable. The craft was basically a wooden rowboat, with a separate and overlarge tiller. Inside sat a tall, stately-looking woman. “Get in—all of you,” she commanded.

I looked at the other three, then complied. There was no use in pressing anything with the Elders right now, and time was needed to find the information I sought.

Fortunately the current was with us in this direction, so the oars were secured and the pilot let the river take us with it. We left the cavern, then went around a fairly sharp bend, and came to another landing, but didn’t stop there. We passed several more such landings, with tunnels leading off in both directions, before we reached the one the pilot wanted. She tied off the boat with a rope, then jumped out and helped us up onto the rocky floor. We were led back along a narrow cave that seemed mostly natural, but which opened into a fairly large chamber. By torchlight we could see it contained a thick floor of some strawlike material, a few crude handmade wooden chairs, a small writing desk but nothing to write with, and very little else. It did, however, have a crude water system; a streamlet issuing from a small rock fissure was channeled into and along a trough. The stream was pretty swift, and it exited through another small fissure at the other end of the room. Just before that exit point was a crude, hand-rubbed toilet top.

“The water is fresh and pure,” our guide explained. “The current is swift enough so that waste products will be swiftly carried away. Food will be brought to you shortly, and regularly. Please stay here until the Elders decide what to do with you. Swimming in the river is not recommended, however. The river’s eventual outlet is the larger waterfall in the courtyard, and the drop is more than forty meters into stone.” With that, she turned and was gone.

Bura looked after her for a moment, then turned to me. “I gather we’re prisoners, then?”

“Looks like it,” I had to admit. “But these people know what I want to know. However, maybe they’re right. Maybe we can’t make our revolution. But I
still
want to know how to change my form to suit me at will. Whether we can build an army or not, that knowledge would sure increase
our
options.”

Ching looked around and shook her head. “I knew we should have just stayed in the forest. They’re gonna let us rot here until we’re as old as they are.”

I went over to her, hugged her, and gave her a small kiss. “No they won’t. For one thing, they just don’t know what to do with us right now. Give them some time. I don’t think they want to be like TMS and the city people, and that’s just what they’d be like if they killed us. Besides,” I added with a wink, “if we got out of the Rochande sewers, what’s this place?”

It quickly developed that Ching’s fears were grossly misplaced. While we were, in fact, being held prisoner, our time was not to be wasted in some dank cell inside a mountain but in what proved to be quite an education for all of us. And the food was good—an odd sort of fishy-tasting mammal as a main course, but supplemented with good fresh fruit and the tastiest edible leaves. A very small portable power plant from the old days still worked; it was used for a small hydroponics setup entirely within the mountain that fed the staff. What else it might power I didn’t know.

We were regularly visited by various people who knew an awful lot about Medusa and its history and ways; they brought with them bound hard copies of much computer data now denied the citizens of Medusa’s cities, not to mention large, laboriously handwritten chronicles of the Wild Ones—sorry, the Free Tribes—and their customs.

The first Lord of Medusa to close off the society was a former naval admiral named Kasikian, who had led an abortive and hushed-up coup attempt at Military Systems Command. A lifelong career military man, and a strong disciplinarian, this civilized worlder, born and bred to command, had taken charge on Medusa. He had started out organizing the small freighter fleet, having been given the job by virtue of his vast experience. But he eventually drew to him a number of other military types, plus a lot of disaffected, and this time his
coup d’etat
worked flawlessly. After a period of consolidation, Kasikian began reorganizing Medusan society along military lines, with strict ranks, grades, and chains of command. He was an efficient organizer no matter what his political ideas may have been; it was he who modernized and expanded the industries of Medusa, and he who built the space stations that now circled all four Warden worlds. Ironically, his effect was most dramatic on Cerberus,-which was transformed from a primitive water world to an industrial giant that took what Medusa produced and made it into whatever the Diamond needed.

But after two coup attempts against him, Kasikian became increasingly paranoid, and so was born of his fears and Cerberan computer skills the original monitor system. The society was even more rigidly structured and controlled in military fashion. As a final gesture, realizing he could never extend total control over the people unless they were consolidated in the key cities and kept there, he ordered the pogrom: those who would not commit themselves fully to his system and his government and come into the cities were to be ruthlessly exterminated.

The Elders had explained that less than a thousand survived the bloodbath that followed, most fleeing to a few key pre-prepared places such as the one we were now in, places that had been erased from the records and were, to all outward appearances, just new, small primitive enclaves. Still, Kasikian ordered those few escapees ruthlessly hunted down, no matter what the cost, and he became so obsessed with that mission that he was careless at home. A young officer who was an aide to one of the admiral’s top associates managed to get him as he relaxed in his luxurious command quarters and kill him.

But this young officer, motivated by idealism and revulsion for bloodshed, became pretty bloody himself as he and his followers hunted down and executed all those in the top five grades of the admiral’s government. By the time Tolakah, new Lord of the Diamond, felt secure, his hands were as bloody as the admiral’s—and he not only grew as paranoid, but was soon seduced by his power. The other Lords, particularly Cerberus’, used his paranoia and love of power for their own ends. They needed what Medusa put out, and the system there suited them just fine.

But the monitor system worried Tolakah. He and his own people had managed to get around it, so he knew how vulnerable it was. As a result, he was delighted to get Talant Ypsir, an expert in administration whose ideas on how societies should be organized closely paralleled the late Kasikian’s. Using the computer talent on Cerberus, Ypsir plugged the holes and created a nearly ironclad society—but not for Tolakah’s benefit. Tolakah, in fact, was personally beheaded by Ypsir while the administrative specialist was showing him the master computers in the orbiting space station that totally sealed the society. Complicity with the other Lords was probable; they distrusted the erratic Tolakah, and preferred someone who
knew
he was as corrupt as the others, and enjoyed it.

In the meantime, the last of the survivors of the pogrom managed to gather in the various secret places, and decided on an organization for their society in the wild. Dominant among them was Dr. Kura Hsiu, a cultural anthropologist by trade, who’d come to Medusa as a life study of the Warden organism’s effect on society. She was particularly drawn by the idea of a society where people changed sex as routinely as they changed their clothes, and she considered the work worth the sacrifice. But not now—as a fugitive and exile in the wild. She realized that the remnants were no match for Medusa’s power, but Ypsir seemed to be lapsing into a tolerance as long as they didn’t bother or interfere with him. Medusa was too big a planet for it to be worth tracking down that small a group, which the last two Lords had both considered dispersed and neutralized.

Dr. Hsiu realized that the new generation would be born in the bush, and that they would be culturally far removed from their own children, and so she set about creating a society that would allow the Wild Ones to grow and develop as a native culture, free of all past cultural pollutants. In many ways, it was the greatest task, experiment, and opportunity for an anthropologist in history.

The greater family, or tribal system, seemed the only logical way to go. Groups would have to be large enough to support one another, yet small enough to move with the weather and the food and still not attract Ypsir’s attention. A simple system, based primarily on age, was developed and taught—the younger would respect and follow the elder’s lead, and eventually, if they lived long enough, they, too, would run things. Originally intended just to keep the first generation in guiding control as long as possible, the tradition became quickly institutionalized in the harsh land.

Since political unity beyond the tribal system was impossible, the only basic overlay that would unite the tribes in any way would be a religious one. So the few centers of refuge became holy shrines, and a system of simple belief based on many religions was established.

Early on, though, the religion had taken an odd turn. Instead of worshiping some anthropomorphic god, the religion turned inward, to planet worship, of all things. God lived not in the heavens but inside the earth itself, one god for each world. This seemed logical to the young ones, for did not the Elders say that the heavens were filled with stars and planets and that humans went between them? If God was not in space, then, where was she?

The original Elders went along with the theory because it worked; Dr. Hsiu herself noted that similar faiths in one form or another existed on all three of the other Warden worlds. Later Elders came to believe in it, and most, but not all, now did.

By the second generation in the wild, things had become pretty institutionalized. The Free Tribes everywhere prayed in the direction of the Mount of God, a particularly high peak in the frozen north said to be the backbone of God the Mother Medusa Herself. This explained both the ritualized prayers and the sacrifice of the animal remains back into the pool—a return to Mother Medusa.

The religious centers became retreats for study and meditation, as well as old-age homes for the most elderly, and also places where those who were pregnant came to give birth, if they could. This explained the pregnant woman with the hunting party, and as well why so many in the courtyard had been pregnant.

As to why the Mount of God was chosen, that particularly piqued my interest. It was said that a hunting party had stumbled upon it shortly after the pogrom was in full swing and the hunt was on, and had battled “fierce demons who seemed to besiege the mount but could not climb upon it; demons more horrible to behold than the human mind can comprehend.” These “demons” got a number of the party, but the rest took refuge on the mountain where they had what can only be described as a classic religious experience. They claimed that somehow they had actually touched the mind of God, and as a result of that experience
they had found themselves able to change their shape, form, or gender at will.
This was apparently the beginning of the change toward planet-worship, and their experience was borne out by others who made the journey in their footsteps.

Here was God, then, in a tangible but not easily accessible form, under constant attack by terrible demons who wanted to destroy Her but could not climb the mountain to do so. The demons were terrible enough in taking a fearsome toll of the curious, the pilgrims, and all others; but the experience of anyone able to make it to the mountain and then back off again was the same—a sense that they had talked with God, and had acquired the power to control every damned cell in their bodies by sheer force of will. I could certainly see why the revolution of malleables would be a real pain today for other than cultural reasons. Whatever those animals or creatures were that the accounts called demons, they were terrible and deadly—and very real. I felt sure of that. It would be tough getting enough people to that mountain, and back. Still, that mountain had
something,
some strange power that not only conferred this ability for life but also convinced a lot of hard-headed scientific materialists of the claptrap of this silly religion.