Charon (12 page)

 
"What makes you so sure about me?" I teased, whispering. Still, it was reassuring to have the uncertaintly settled so quickly.

 
"Oh, I don't know," she replied. "I've always been able to tell things about people."

 
"Things?
Like what?"

 
"Oh, like the fact that Tiliar and Garal
are
a couple of hoods who don't really give a damn about us. Or that that big son of a bitch would enjoy breaking people in two just for fun."

 
"And what can you tell about me?"

 
"I—I'm not sure. There's
a hardness
in you somewhere, that's for sure, but you're no psycho. It's almost as if, well, if I didn't know it was impossible I'd say you weren't Park Lacoch at all but somebody very different, somebody who didn't belong in t&at body at all."

 
Her
observations was
dead on, and my respect for her intuitive abilities, if that's what it was, went up a hundred notches. Still, a smooth, glib cover was called for.

 
"In a way you're right," I told her carefully. "I'm not the same man I was all my life. Mentally, I'm the man I
should
have been all along. I owe them at least that much.

 
The old Lacoch's dead and gone, never to return.
He was executed in the psych rooms with my full and hearty cooperation."
That
was true enough, although not in the way it sounded.

 
"Do you still have any doubts about what you are?" she asked. "I mean, ever think of maybe having the operation?"

 
I laughed. "Not anymore," I told her, and proved it, both to her and to my own satisfaction.

CHAPTER FOUR - Interviews and Placement

Over the next few days we got down to learning the basics of the planet through a series of lectures that would normally be very boring—and really were—but which even the most thick-headed of us realized we needed before we took our place in this new society.

 
The economy of Charon was almost entirely agricultural, a combination of subsistence and plantation farming. The service industries were still very primitive. While little could be brought into the Warden Diamond from
Outside—
the general term for every place
except
the Warden system—the planets themselves were not without resources, and material from one world could be shipped and used on others. There were sea creatures that could be caught and eaten that were rich in protein and minerals, and many creatures of the land could also be carefully raised for food. The skins of some of these reptilian creatures were also useful. Shipped to Cerberus, where they apparently had elaborate manufacturing facilities, they could be made into everything from the best waterproof clothing you could find to roofing and insulation materials.

 
I couldn't help but wonder about my Lilith counterpart. I myself was having a tough time with this nontechnqlogi-cal culture on Charon; I wondered if I would even survive in a world whose denizens were rabidly antitechnological. "I" was probably doing far better on Cerberus and Medusa, both of which had a technological level which, if below what I was used to, was nonetheless closer to my element.

 
Another export was the woodlike material that made up the rain forests and provided the foundations for Charon's buildings. Its weather-proofing properties and hardness made it desirable even on worlds that had their own trees.

 
So they exported a great deal of it to Medusa to pay for raw materials. Medusa controlled the asteroid and moon mining industries. The raw materials were sent to Cerberus where they were made into things they needed and could use under their peculiar conditions. All in all it was a neat and interdependent system.

 
The political system on Charon was also a good topic, and a most revealing one. I remembered Krega's comment that Matuze would become a goddess if she could and I was thus not as surprised as the rest.

 
The vast majority of the eleven million or so inhabitants of Charon were, of course, the workers who were mere citizens. In a nicely feudal arrangement, they worked for Companies—a euphemism for plantations basically—in exchange for which the Companies guaranteed their safety and all their basic needs.

 
There was a small town at the center of every dozen or so
Companies,
and the townspeople were also organized, this time into what were called Unions, based on trade, profession, or skill. The political head of each town was, interestingly but logically, the Town Accountant, whose office kept all the books not only on what the town produced or provided but what the Companies owed for those services. Although it was a barter system (until you got to the very top anyway), some money was in circulation—coins, made of some iron alloy. They were a good small currency, since without any significant metals the supply was strictly controlled by trade with Medusa.

 
In the Companies, the coins were used basically as rewards for exceptional work, so there was very little money there. In the towns, however, each Union had a set wage and a varying scale of who got paid what based on a number of factors; the money was used to buy some necessities—the Unions provided housing—and all luxuries, which weren't many. The Transportation Union, of course, was planetwide and centered in Honuth; and it used the coins to buy what was needed along the way. Honuth, being the spaceport, was the largest city on Charon— although there
was
a freightport on the southern continent, a land just now starting to be developed—and greater Hon-uth consisted of maybe five thousand people. The average town was a tenth that size.

 
Companies and Unions were run by Managers who lived pretty well as long as they produced. The Town Accountants kept tabs on them all, and
that
tab was forwarded to the Board of Regents which collectively kept track of everything and got the requirements from the towns and Companies and the raw materials and finished products they needed from off-planet The head of the Board of Regents was called the Director, and he was the top government official on Charon.
A simple system, one that seemed to work.

 
However, there was a parallel system as wen, and this one was a little bit off the beaten track. It was composed of the small number of men and women who were in command of the Warden organism and its uses. These were the people to watch. As I'd suspected, the political and "magical" ends were not necessarily the same.

 
At the low end of this parallel system were the apts, the students of the art, who studied under and worked for journeymen magicians, usually referred to as sores, which
was short for sorcerers
. The sores were represented in every Company and
Union
and in every Town Accountant's office, too. They protected the people who had to be protected, enforced the rules and laws, and generally gave advice and consent when asked.

 
Basically, the magicians and their students were the cops. They reported to a board of Bishops whose responsibilities encompassed whole planetary areas. Collectively this group was known as the Synod.

 
Interestingly, the Bishops were appointed by the Director, who could hire or fire them at will. I wondered how the hell Matuze could make a firing of somebody that powerful stick—and why the Bishops were in any way obedient to her in the first place—but they were. The reason was something to be found out later. Still, the system confirmed my basic idea that Matuze herself, while probably schooled in those magical arts and reasonably competent, wasn't the top witch or whatever in terms of magical power.

 
Sooner or later I'd have to find out just what the Director's base of power was.

 
One thing was sure—Matuze had not only all the political power but all the respect and pomp as well. She was almost invariably referred to in ancient royal terms, such as "Her Highness" or even "Her Worship"; but she was nevertheless, the Lord, not the Lady, of the Diamond.

 
She liked to have her picture
everywhere, that
was for sure. Four different full-size portraits adorned the lobby. When the rain actually stopped for periods and we had walking tours of the town, I found her likeness almost everywhere, even on many of the corns we were shown— but not all. Older coins showed several men's faces, different men, and while I was sure she hated them I could see she was practical enough not to go to all the trouble and expense of replacing all the old currency until it was worn out—not when the mint was 160 million kilometers away. All the portraits showed her much the way I remembered her—fairly young, attractive, somewhat aloof and aristocratic. Even though she was from the civilized worlds and conformed to the norm, there was something in that personality that even portraits caught, something that made her
stand
out. I couldn't help but wonder, though, if she still really looked that good.

 
The animal life on Charon was too diverse to keep track of, and was quite strange depending on which of the three continents you were on. Difficult as it was in rain-soaked Honuth to believe, animals existed on the parched central continent for
whom
rain could be disabling, even deadly. The most important thing, from a survival viewpoint, was that the animals also possess a certain power for magic. It was on a primitive level, of course, but the carnivores, in particular, could quite often make you think they were a tree, a bush, or even a pretty flower, until you came too close. Some of the carrion-eaters in particular could project whole landscapes, disorienting and confusing travelers as well as instinct-driven herbivorous prey, causing bogs to look like rocks or land water.

 
"In a very real sense," Garal warned us, "walking along unprotected on Charon in broad daylight in good weather is like walking blindly in pitch-dark night, never knowing what is waiting for you, never knowing what is real and what is not."

 
This situation, of course, reinforced the feudal Company system. Nobody dared walk away, nor even travel from town to town, without the protection and abilities of a sore. Charon was a deadly place indeed, well-suited for easy population control and political domination.

 
But Charon didn't worry me because in the long run its least common denominators were the same socio-economic factors that supported every world, even the Confederacy itself. Here, you got the training to use the power if you could—the easy way up, like being born to power or position elsewhere. Failing that, you found somebody who
did
have the power and rode up with that individual, using that person's power as your own—a slower and more delicate method than the first, but one that worked.

 
I realized, of course, why we were being kept in this hotel in this rain-soaked town for so long. Our hosts were waiting for the final "set in" of the Warden organism in order to demonstrate its effects—and powers. We were the cream of the criminal crop; we had to be shown explicitly who was boss first.

 
With one exception, that is. Zala continued to be more and more of an enigma to me. I realized very early on that she had been lying about herself, at least in part—she was never trained to be an accountant or, for that matter, in any similar profession. In just routine conversation and in discussing the briefings it became clear that her counting ability only slightly exceeded the capacity of her fingers and toes; her reading ability was similarly quite basic. That put her well outside any government, business, or scientific areas of expertise. It confined her, in fact, to the lowest job classes, not at all unusual for the frontier but very unusual for one of the civilized worlds.

 
But lies were the stock in trade of people sent to Charon, so the problem wasn't that she was lying but that she was a bundle of contradictions. The ego, the sense of self-worth in the job you were born to do, was central to the social fabric of the civilized worlds. Everyone had a job they did well and knew was important, even vital, and something few others could do as well. Sex was casual and recreational There were, of course, no family units and everyone's egocentrism kept the concept of individualism a core idea. You had a circle of friends certainly, but no dependency on others in a psychological sense. The slogan "Interdependence in work, independence in self* was everywhere and was always being drummed into you.

 
But not Zala.
Zala
needed
somebody else, and I do mean needed. She latched onto me immediately despite the distinct possibility that I was still a mass murderer of women. I had enjoyed out sexual encounters; she had required, needed them. She was simply incapable of existing, let alone
surviving,
on her own for very long—and that was an incredible idea for someone like me from the civilized worlds. Timid and passive, she lacked any of the egocentrism I took for granted. I didn't have any illusions that she'd chosen me because of some innate magnetic charm or superior radiance I gave off. She'd chosen me because I happened to be there, was convenient, and therefore the one.