“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.
But once I was chosen, she was totally solicitous of my welfare to the exclusion even of her own, as if she had no thoughts of her own but simply awaited my pleasure. Although her behavior was demeaning in my eyes and bothered me in the extreme, nonetheless I have to admit I got a certain charge from it, since it certainly fed my own ego beyond anything I had come to expect short of service robots.
And yet, and yet… How the hell did somebody like her her ever get to be at all, particularly on the civilized worlds? And why was she sent to the Warden Diamond?
Late in the evening of the fourth day on Charon I decided to confront her. Her response, which was both embarrassed and nervous at being caught in so obvious a lie, did little to answer my basic questions about her.
“I—well, you’re right,” she admitted. “I’m not an administrator. But the rest is true. I am, well, what they call a bio-slot Entertainer, but that isn’t really quite right either. Basically, well, the planetary administrators often have guests from other planets and from the Confederacy itself. There are banquets and entertainments of course for the bigwigs—and I’m part of it. My job is—was—to provide those important people with just about anything they wanted. Keep them happy.”
Now I knew what she meant. I’d seen a number of her type in just such circumstances while working on cases involving business and government bigwigs. The very sameness of the civilized worlds made them pretty dull. When you saw one you saw them all. Even the entertainments, meals and the like were standardized—in the name of equality, of course. It was a perfect and proper system, but there were still men and women in incredibly high places who had to be impressed when they dropped in on your little world, and those in the Entertainer class were the ones to do it They planned and set up banquets that would be unique and offer exotic delicacies. They planned and performed unusual entertainments, including live dancing and even more esoteric demonstrations. And if even sex was boring they could provide really exotic demonstrations there too. So that’s what Zala was—literally programmed and trained and raised to do anything and everything for other people. Cut off from that, she’d naturally latched onto the first person that would make her feel valued—me.
But these facts didn’t explain what she was doing here, or why she had lied.
“As for the lie, well, it seemed better here to be an administrative assistant than an entertainer. They would have just thrown me in some kind of frontier-style brothel and that would have been that. I am not a whore! My profession is a valuable and honorable one—back home.” Big tears started to well up in her eyes, and I found myself somehow on the defensive instead of the attack. She was really good at that.
Still, she stuck to the rest of her story. She was supposedly a genetic illegal, of what kind she hadn’t been told, and she had been shipped here without a clue as to why. Shifting her to the right slot in life had cleared up one of my mysteries, but left her big one still unanswered.
On the afternoon of our fifth day, we got a taste of what was to come on Charon. Some minor tests had been performed without our knowing about them; they proved we were now fully “affiliated”—or seasoned—and ready to face the cold, cruel world. One of the tests, I discovered, involved the excellent soup we’d been served for lunch. Everybody had had some, everybody loved it; the only trouble was there hadn’t been any soup.
At the end of the meal it came as a big shock when Garal stood up and announced, “We will need no service to clear this soup from the table.” He waved his hand, and the soup—bowls, spoon, and tureen—suddenly and abruptly vanished. Even the spots where some had spilled a little on the tablecloth instantly vanished.