By the time the population had stabilized at around two hundred, it was obvious that every female would have to be kept pregnant every day for the rest of her life, until her womb cried uncle, or the race would wither on the vine. And she had to be protected from Selva, which was virtually a sentence of life imprisonment with time off for old age.
At first the women were kept in the five colonizing vessels, now useless as transportation but proof against teeth and claws. The men stayed with them at night and ventured out during the day to hunt, which was easy, and to try to farm, which was rather difficult with one eye and one hand otherwise occupied.
After some ten years they did manage to build high fortifications around each ship. The electric fences, which had proved useless before because dead creatures would just pile up and eventually make a bridge, were unraveled and restrung as barriers against the gliding monsters.
Population pressure shoved the walls outward as the years went by. The people lived first in capsules, then stockades, then forts, and finally in walled towns. Eventually five towns grew together to form the sprawling city of Castile Cervantes.
There were schools, but they taught a minimum of academic subjects and a maximum of how to stay alive.
Most of the first generation still considered themselves communists. The second generation thought communism was ridiculous. The third generation was sentimental about it, and by the tenth generation very few people knew what it was.
With the women locked away like precious jewelry and the men spending half their waking hours in the expectation or dispensation of bloody murder, it was not surprising that an ugly form of social organization should develop. Since strength and ruthlessness were the only survival traits, the strongest and most ruthless went to the top and made their own rules.
They conquered their own planet in three hundred years. When they started looking for other worlds to conquer, they broke one of the very few interplanetary laws—and the Confederation, through its clandestine TBII arm, sent one man to check out the situation.
Otto McGavin was still alive when dawn broke and the miscellaneous uglies tromped or slithered or flopped or flapped back to their holes and caves.
He sat exhausted in the middle of a wide circle of burned, bizarre-looking meat. That was what had saved him. He hadn’t had to fire a single shot in the past hour—Selva’s night foragers naturally preferred a freshly dead meal to going to the trouble of killing the new one that spat fire.
When the sun cleared the top of the jungle canopy Otto saw no sign of life in either the jungle or the clearing. Finally feeling safe, he automatically slipped back into the Ramos Guajana personality. He shook a fist at the dead creatures and shouted a joyful curse. Then he removed the sheath knife from the side of his kit, sliced a chunk of thigh from one of a creature’s six, and cheerfully munched on it as he plunged into the jungle.
At Ramos’s normal walking speed, he could cover 12.8 kilometers in a comfortable hour and a half. But junge trails are slow going and it was nearing dusk—Ramos was starting to get worried—when he broke into a clearing at the base of a steep hill. A handsome brick-and-stone building, evidently a lodge of some sort, sat on the top of the hill. Halfway up the hill a moat protected a substantial wall topped with electric webbing. He followed the path up the hill to the moat. A steelite drawbridge lowered and Ramos, wake-up jungle noises at his back, hurried across it. Another steelite door inside and the drawbridge rose behind him, trapping him in a small area.
“I am not programmed to admit you,” a metallic voice said, “and the proprietress is not at home to identify you.” A light came on in a little alcove to his left. “You are protected from the night, however, and there are sanitary facilities and food machines to your left.” There sure were—all coin-operated. All he had was in large bills—and counterfeit at that.
“Can you change a fifty?” he asked the machine.
“Repeat, please.”
“Can you change a fifty?”
“I am not programmed to admit you—”
“Oh, shut up!” That was evidently in its programing—it shut up.
When he picked the lock on the toilet the light went out.
He napped for an hour or so on a bench behind the useless sandwich machine. A small noise—the door being unlocked—woke him up; he took cover behind the machine and centered his laser on where he thought the door was. The nightglasses were packed away in his kit.
“Guajana,” a female voice said, “Ramos Guajana?”
“Sí. Aqui.” His contact, R. Eshkol, was a woman? On this planet?
“Oh, there you are.” She walked toward him. “Put away that gun and take my hand. I’ll guide you up to the place.”
They walked up a steep path. “I’ve been out in a flyer, looking for you,” she said. “I discovered where you spent the night. Very impressive, especially without nightglasses.”
He didn’t say anything.
How many months since he had been this close to a woman? His hand sweated, clammy in her warm soft one; he felt wave after wave of sexual tension, so acute it affected stomach more than loins, every time he stumbled into a rounded hip or backside.
“Hey, cob. Keep your hands to yourself.”
“Mierde, no veo,” he growled. With effort: “Sorry. I can’t see.”
“Uh-huh. Well, we’re almost there.” As they neared the top, Ramos could barely make out a gray bulk looming.
“Here we are.” She stopped and worked a heavy-sounding iron lock. “The Vista Hermosa Hotel. ‘Hotel of the beautiful view,’” she translated needlessly. “Went out of business twenty years ago—watch your step—and the Confederación bought it through proxies.” They were inside, walking over a musty-smelling carpet.
“For such an emergency as this?”
“No, it’s… pretty simple; they thought for a while that the Senado was moving to Paracho, wanted a cheap place for a consulate. Got stuck with it. Stairs.” Ramos hit the first tread as she said that; stumbled and, groping, found her calf.
He touched her again standing up, and she showed her affection with a stinging slap.
Coolly, Ramos grabbed her wrist and twisted her off balance. He fell on top of her, pinning her under his knees, and pressed the muzzle of the pistol to her throat, swearing gutturally. He snapped the safety off and then slowly clicked it back on. He stood up.
“Sorry. Please remember. I am Ramos Guajana.”
She regained her feet with a rustling of full skirts. Her voice quavered. “I know. But I am what I am, too. On Shalom we… don’t touch people that way!”
Nothing to say, Ramos shifted the pack on his back noisily.
She sighed. “Give me your hand. It’s not much farther.”
They went to the top of the stairs and down a corridor to the left. The door to Otto’s quarters opened noiselessly and closed with a solid snap.
“Thumbprint lock. We’ll reset it.” The lights came on, dazzling.
The windowless room had three pieces of cheap furniture: an airbed in one corner and a wooden desk and chair in another. A small holo cube on the desk showed the inside of a cell where a man was sleeping. By the desk was a rack holding seven swords. Ramos crossed to it and ran his fingers lightly along the Blades. “Adequate,” he said. He pulled one out of the rack and made a few passes at an imaginary foe. Then he looked closely at the sword.
“I’ll need a whetstone and a leather strop. And a roll of tape for these handles. Black tape, the kind electricians use.” For the first time, he looked up and saw the girl.
“Uh…” By the standards of Shalom, she was a plain-looking woman. Which meant she was perhaps less perfect of figure and feature than Helen of Troy. She was dressed the way young women all dressed in this part of Selva; a clinging velvety bodice revealing only the tops of her breasts, clasping her body down to just pass the hipbones, swelling out into a full ruffled skirt, long by Earth standards.
Considering that nine-tenths of him had been
three times jailed for rape, and ten-tenths had been locked up in a tiny T-46 for weeks, Ramos reacted in a fairly gentlemanly way: he dropped the sword, snarled, and took three steps toward her, clutching—
And from an intimate place she produced a small black pistol. “Now you stay right where you are!” she said, more hysteria than menace in her voice. But it was quite obvious that she was going to burn him down in another second, and the sense of immediate danger put Otto in full control of the body.
His own pistol was lying on top of his kit, which he had dropped from his back in the center of the room. If she was any kind of a marksman, she could hit him five or six times before he’d be able to reach it. He put his hands on top of his head.
“Now, now,” he said. “Don’t get excited, it’s just—heh, well—you know…”
“It’s like they say,” she said, a little more calmly, curiously. “You’re actually two people.”
“That’s correct.” He bowed slightly at the waist, hands still on top of his head. “Otto McGavin, at your service.”
“Well, you better stay ‘Otto McGavin’ for a while.” She lowered the pistol. “What a strange name you’ve—”
Ramos dropped his hands to his side, in claws, and was inching forward. She brought up the pistol again and he raised his hands, more slowly this time.
“Can’t you control yourself for just one second?”
“Calm, please, calm down now… uh… no, actually, really, I can’t, well, exactly control it. When I’m not in immediate danger I have to automatically act like Guajana. Otherwise I might accidentally, you know, act out of character.”
She was backing toward the door. “Well, don’t think for a second you’re going to act in character with me.” Hand on the knob. “I don’t think we’ll reset the lock after all. Not until I figure out what to do with you.” She snapped off the lights, jumped through the door, and slammed it behind her.
A fraction of a second later, Ramos crashed into the locked door. “Cago en la leche de la madre de su madre!” he raged. He pounded on the door with his fists, cursing more loudly and ever more imaginatively for a few minutes. Then he walked heavily across the dark room and felt his way to the bed.
3.
“Wake up, McGavin, Guajana; whatever your name is.” Ramos snapped awake and looked around but there was no one in the room. Then he saw her small image in the holo cube.
“Goat bitch,” he said illogically, sneering, “I no longer desire you. Set me free that I might go find a female of my own species.”
She sniffed contemptuously. “Sooner or later, you’ll be free enough. Right now, there’s work to be done.” She faded away and was replaced by the image of the real Ramos Guajana, sitting in his cell. The resemblance to Otto/Ramos was fairly exact.
Her voice over Ramos’s image: “Notice that he has a new lump on his head and a healing cut on his lip. He got these fighting with a guard day before yesterday.
“We have orders saying you must match him as near perfectly as possible before you can begin your mission. It would be dangerous to risk cosmetics, of course, so we are going to have to inflict similar injuries on—”
“Please come and try.”
“That won’t be necessary. Not me personally, anyhow.”
The door to his quarters swung open, and a big ugly specimen stood there with a gun in one hand and a padded club in the other.
“Sorry, Colonel McGavin,” he said, raising the gun. “Anesthetic.” He fired as Otto tensed to leap.
Ramos woke up with a pulsating ache in his head and a swollen, stinging lip. He counted teeth with his tongue; they were all there, but a couple were loose.
“There’s some analgesic in the desk drawer, Colonel.” The man who had put him to sleep and, presumably, knocked him around while he was unconscious was still in the room. Or again in the room; he’d gotten rid of the gun and the club. He was sitting against the far wall with two swords and two clear plastic helmets.
“Call me Ramos,” he said, going to the desk. Standing up and walking produced a sensation not unlike that of having someone probe his temple with an ice pick. Ramos touched the side of his head and closed his eyes for a second, tried to ignore the pain, and failed.
He took the pill and touched his lip gingerly. “I suppose I should thank you. Do you render this service often?”
“Not for cosmetic purposes.” He stood up. “Thought you might like to go a couple of rounds. These are practice swords, épées.” He tossed one to Ramos, who caught it by the handle without effort.
“You feel up to it?”
“I suppose.” Actually, Ramos/Otto felt a thousand per cent better, even with the new lumps, than he had in Dr. Ellis’s office on Earth. The personality overlay people had had to overdo the damage to his body to allow for healing during the four weeks’ transit. He wasn’t up to normal pitch for either Guajana or McGavin, but he had some measure of strength and swiftness back.
“Frankly,” the big man said while Ramos tested the balance and temper of the weapon, “I’m skeptical. I don’t see how they can teach you in a few weeks what it took Guajana most of his life to master.”
Ramos shrugged. “It’s only temporary.” He sized up the other man. He moved with a grace that seemed almost effeminate for a man of his size. He had all of the physiological advantages for fencing: taller than Ramos by a head and a half, long arms and legs. But Ramos knew that people with a long reach and a long lunge tended to get overconfident with a small opponent. It would be fun, setting him up for the kill.
Ramos adjusted the helmet, a cool porous plastic shield that protected his face and ears and throat.
“I’ll take it easy at first,” the other man said.
“No need.” They took up garde positions in the center of the room. Ramos noted that his opponent’s blade was canted out of line to the right by more than two centimeters, exposing a little too much shoulder and forearm. His opponent either had bad form or had set up a trap, not a terribly subtle one. Without thinking about it, Ramos executed an attack that would take care of either alternative—in one motion feinting to the exposed forearm, slipping under the expected parry, then double-disengage (bell guard high for this line against the possibility of stop thrust or out-of-time remise), lunge, and the blunted point thumped to rest precisely between the third and fourth ribs.
“Tocar,” the big man acknowledged, fingering thoughtfully the spot where he had been touched. “I’ll have to be more careful.”
He was more careful, and very good by anybody’s standards, but in five engagements Ramos scored five touches. None of the clashes lasted more than a few seconds; the longest was attack-parry-riposte-parry-remise-parry-rere-mise-touch.
“Very strange.” The man took off his mask. “Colonel, uh, Ramos, I mean… you say they taught you how to fence like Guajana?”
“That’s right.”
“But I’ve fenced with Guajana—hundreds of times!—and…”
“And you’re still alive?”
“No, no, not dueling. He was my coach five, six years ago. That’s why—anyhow, you don’t really fence much like him… a casual opponent wouldn’t see it, but I know where his weaknesses are; I’ve even beaten him a few times. You don’t have those weaknesses, not those particular ones.”
“Ah.” Ramos’s brow furrowed, searching his memory of the mission profile. “Well, it’s understandable. I had to get it secondhand, since the real Guajana was stuck here. They got the best fencing masters they could find—Italy, Hungary, France—”
“All the way from France!”
“No, not the planet; those are countries on Earth. They got these masters and had them study tapes of Guajana at work. Then the masters taught me in tandem, simultaneously, all of us under hypnosis. So I got imprinted with a kind of average impression of Guajana’s style.”
“Complicated,” the man said. “But easy, compared to learning the real way. I’m glad it doesn’t last.”
“I wi
sh it could last a little longer. I’ve got to wrap up this project before the imprinting starts to fade. Two months at the very most.”
“Anything I can do to help, of course—”
“No. Don’t even say it. You don’t want to help; you don’t even want to know anything more about this than you do now. Same goes for that bitch—”
“Rachel?” He looked hurt. “But… she’s the TBII liaison.”
“Something this backwoods planet shouldn’t even have! I never feel safe on an assignment where somebody else knows my true identity. People have a nasty way of being compelled to talk. So far, two of you know who I am. How many others—the whole embassy staff?”
“No, we’re the only two.”
“Then the best thing you could do for me, both of you, would be to get offplanet. Right now.”
“Mr. Guajana,” came a thin voice, Rachel’s, from the cube, “try to remember that we are the officially appointed representatives of the Confederación on this planet. You are only a tool, a specialist sent to aid us in the resolution of this problem. It’s still our respons—”
‘“You know, I don’t give a flying—” Ramos stopped, continued in a lower voice: “Deep down inside, I don’t really care whether Selva builds a thousand warships and blasts Grünwelt back to the Stone Age. I would never even have heard of Selva if your Alvarez hadn’t come down with an Attila complex.” Normally, Guajana remembered vaguely, he was very polite and suave with ladies.
“Then I wouldn’t say that you were ideally motivated for your job,” she said scornfully. “Don’t you have even a little sympathy for—”
“Sympathy, motivation, mierde.” He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “Sympathies can change and motivation is a simple word for something nobody understands. I do a good job, the best job I can, because I’ve been conditioned down to the last brain cell and stringy nerve to complete my mission. I am totally reliable because nobody but the TBI I has the knowledge and equipment to break my conditioning.”