Melchior was not at all what Chu Li had expected. True, it was inside an
asteroid, and there was a strange coldness and dryness to the air, but everyone
had been quite nice and quite professional all the way. She didn’t really know
what the place looked like, of course, but at the moment it seemed more like a
hospital than a horrible prison. They were even going to attend to the terrible
scars of the Chow sisters. Of course, the fact that their records now identified
them as some other people and seemed to come from the higher security levels of
China Center didn’t hurt, nor did the fact that such records could not be
cross-checked with Master System files here.
Melchior was an exciting and exotic place, one that she would like to have seen.
She hoped that they would restore her sight quickly. But even if they did not,
she would get a totally new identity. A complete sex change, some cosmetic
changes, even subtly different fingerprints and a slightly altered eye pattern.
She could walk right into China Center and right up to Song Ching’s miserable
relatives, and they would never know.
Doctor Isaac Clayben looked over the data modules on the subject and frowned.
You were right to come to me, he told the assistant. You’re sure there’s no
mistake?
Absolutely, sir. We took the print when we suspected something and checked it
without her even knowing it.
And the other two?
Petty criminals sent here because Doctor Shasvik wanted as many identical twins
as he could get. You must admit, sir, that she’s both brazen and. brilliant even
to have tried this. I have no idea how she could have switched full
identification through Master System with this Chu Li boy. I would have sworn it
was impossible without coming through here to begin with. In fact, her only
mistake was that Melchior is not on Master System, so our records aren’t updated
when the master is. With the systemwide alert, we naturally put them all
through. Her eye and prints matched up with Song Ching, and the other two are
former servants of some high-ranking security officer in China Center. When we
shot them back to Earth for a run-through, though, Master System identified her
absolutely as Chu Li, a natural male. Fascinating.
Clayben scratched his scruffy full beard. Pity. They are going to make this
Song Ching into nothing more than breeding stock. Anyone who could do this is a
mind that shouldn’t be lost to some culturally sexist attitudes. She could
easily do the one thing without sacrificing the other. No one at China Center
has been notified?
No, sir. Do you wish me to call them?
No. Not yet. Let me think about this. In the meantime, continue with all the
tests but do absolutely no surgery, psycho or physical.
Very well. What about the blindness? It’s a simple trap program from a portable
mindprinter. We could remove it in twenty or thirty minutes.
Leave it. Give her a fancy and convincing but meaningless excuse. If she can
get herself shipped here, change Master System records, take control of a
spaceship in midflight, and come up with something so basic that only a lifetime
of thinking about beating Master System flawed her success, we don’t want her
getting oriented here. Imagine somebody like that running loose in this place.
It was a sobering thought.
Come to think of it, Clayben added, separate her from her two friends and
place them all in the Security Block in the prison. If she figures out where she
is, tell her it’s routine until everything is set so that no one will know she
is even due for a change.
I doubt she’ll buy that.
What’s the difference? And she might, which would make life a lot easier for
us. If she figures it out and causes enough uproar, tell her the truth, which
includes the fact that I might decide to go through with it anyway and put her
to work here. Someone that young who’s that good at beating the best could be
very valuable.
Shall we encode her?
The boss thought about it. Yes, but slip her a mild sedative first so that she
doesn’t know it. Encode her as Chu Li and adjust our records accordingly. If I
decide not to send her home, I don’t want her father coming in here some day and
finding out that she was ever here.
When the aide left, Doctor Clayben sat back in his large padded desk chair and
sighed. He was a man of advancing middle age and looked it; he had achieved the
position of Director of the Medical Section of Melchior, a dream assignment and
one which involved being able to poke into everybody’s ideas whenever he liked.
Although not a Presidium member himself, he worked for the body as a whole and
so had no loyalty or obligation to any one person. He saw himself as a pure
scientist, in the one position where he and his colleagues were free from any
concepts of forbidden knowledge or political, moral, and religious restrictions.
He had no reservations about authorizing the most radical experiments on human
beings; he used only prisoners sent here by the Presidium, people who would have
otherwise been executed back on Earth. He felt he gave their miserable lives
meaning by allowing them to contribute to the growth of human knowledge,
knowledge which for the most part remained right here, under his authority and
under his control.
Not even the Presidium guessed the amount of power, knowledge, and abilities
contained within Melchior’s small confines. The girl had wanted to become a
fully functioning male. Child’s play. Clayben knew, as most did not, what the
bulk of humanity had become out there among the vast stars. It had become alien
to its birth species and alien to all in many ways, although curiously still
human in the mind. Humanity had always been adaptable; that was its key to
survival. It could learn to live permanently with little or no modern technology
in arctic wastes or steaming, acidic tropical jungles. Moving five billion
people to a thousand worlds was no easy task in the old days, particularly since
no two planets were alike and the supply of those tolerable even to adapted
humans was rather low.
Humanity, without technological support, was actually very fragile. Earth had
been just right, just exactly right, and what evolved there evolved to match it.
Within Earth tolerances, humanity was supreme, but Earth tolerances, while not
unique, were very rare indeed. Master System had been in a hurry, and Master
System developed the means—possibly right here, on Melchior—to get the job done
expeditiously. Clayben knew the means and the methods. That knowledge often made
him feel like a god.
Certainly it was better than being a tinpot Presidium dictator always doing the
System’s bidding and feeling, every time a minor victory was scored, like the
little boy who steals pie cooling in the window and gets away with it. Isaac
Clayben feared only one thing about Master System, but he could not allow
himself to dwell on it: Some day Master System would tire of this sufferance of
its loyal servants, or become too suspicious, or not need its Presidium anymore,
and then blast this rock into atoms.
Although they remembered nothing of their existence from the time of the hypno
treatment along the banks of the Mississippi to the moment they woke up aboard a
spaceship, both Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman were somewhat traumatized by their
sudden propulsion from a nontechnological culture to one so advanced that it
seemed only magical. Magical but cold, Cloud Dancer decided. There was no fresh
air, or warm sun, or cold winter’s night, or the smell of trees and flowers
here. No sense of freedom or of the vastness of a starry sky or an endless
horizon. There were only sterile walls, sterile seats and furnishings, and
unnatural things. The toilet had taken her days to understand, and the shower
seemed somehow a violator of her body. Food, both hot and cold, appeared
magically on large trays, yet it all tasted like week-old lard.
Still, both women were committed to Hawks, wherever he might lead. They had
already followed him to hell; there could be no place left to go but up.
Manka Warlock was as cool, aloof, and condescending as ever, but if she fell
into any more fits of madness, they didn’t see it. Raven seemed far more relaxed
and always the pragmatist. Hawks suspected that Chen had given Warlock a bit of
enforced calming with a mindprinter, changing only her irrational extremes and
not her basic self. Such calm wouldn’t hold; no one except Warlock would be
surprised if she were due for something more than a job when she got to
Melchior.
Hawks himself was trying to decide whether he had won a reprieve or was now
condemned to the circles of hell. The only thing known about Melchior was that
it was a prison from which there had never been an escape, though obviously
people did—if rarely—come and go from there. He began to wonder how much of a
fool he had been in not taking Chen’s offer at the start. Certainly they could
make him accept and love anything once they had him on Melchior; they could
convince him that the sky was purple and he was Lazlo Chen’s identical twin
brother. He consoled himself in the rather certain hunch that even if he had
accepted, he’d still be aboard this ship. Raven and Warlock had accepted, and
here they were. Chen was not about to accept promises of fidelity no matter what
the oath.
They disembarked directly into a high-security area, with armed security guards
and automatic security devices everywhere, and were then printed and processed.
The women understood only that they were to be imprisoned in a strange cave;
their views of creation did not yet encompass a sufficient cosmology to
understand just where they were or the nature of Melchior. It was a place in the
Inner Dark, a spiritual realm ruled by spirits of evil. That was enough.
They were stripped, decontaminated, bound, then blindfolded and linked together
for the final part of their journey. Silent Woman particularly protested the
treatment, and Cloud Dancer was none too happy, but Hawks managed to calm them,
convincing them that nothing could be done until they were settled and could get
information, so there was no purpose to any resistance at this point. Privately
he wondered if there was any possibility of successful resistance even later.
Like Dante, he had been forced by his enemies into entering hell alive; unlike
Dante, he had no spirit guides to get him safely through and out again.
At the end of the nightmarish and disorienting journey, in which they seemed
almost to float or fly in places, they were brought to a small, unfurnished room
watched by security monitors all around the ceiling. Their blindfolds removed,
they saw that Raven and Warlock were no longer with them, and none wished for a
reunion. Those two had been replaced with an officious woman who looked as if
she had been carved from some massive stone block, dull gray uniform and all.