“Show me.”

He bowed his head in mocking, semi-formal acquiescence. “Modern warfare can be fought on so many delightfully different levels,” he continued, walking back to her side as if no interruption of the tour had been suggested. “One wins a battle by making sure one’s troops have enough blunderbusses and battle axes like the ones you saw in the first room; or by the well-placed six-inch length of vanadium wire in a Type 27-QX communications unit. With the proper orders delayed, the encounter never takes place. Hand-to-hand weapons, survival kit, plus training, room, and board: three thousand credits per enlisted stellarman over a period of two years active duty. For a garrison of fifteen hundred men that’s an outlay of four million, five hundred credits. That same garrison will live in and fight from three hyperstasis battleships which, fully equipped, run about a million and a half credits apiece—a total outlay of nine million credits. We have spent, on occasion, perhaps as much as a million on the preparation of a single spy or saboteur. That is rather higher than usual. And I can’t believe a six-inch length of vanadium wire costs a third of a cent. War is costly. And although it has taken some time, Administrative Alliance Headquarters is beginning to realize subtlety pays. This way, Miss—Captain Wong.”

Again they were in a room with only a single display case, but it was seven feet high.

A statue, Rydra thought. No, real flesh, with detail of muscle and joint; no, it must be a statue because a human body, dead or in suspended animation, doesn’t look that… alive. Only art could produce that vibrancy.

“So you see, the proper spy is very important.” Though the door had opened automatically, the Baron held it with his hand in vestigial politeness. “This is one of our more expensive models. Still well under a million credits, but one of my favorites—though in practice he has his faults. With a few minor alterations I would like to make him a permanent part of our arsenal.”

“A model of a spy?” Rydra asked. “Some sort of robot or android?”

“Not at all.” They approached the display case. “We made half a dozen TW-55’s. It took the most exacting genetic search. Medical science has progressed so that all sorts of hopeless human refuse lives and reproduces at a frightening rate—inferior creatures that would have been too weak to survive a handful of centuries ago. We chose our parents carefully, and then with artificial insemination we got our half dozen zygotes, three male, three female. We raised them in, oh, such a carefully controlled nutrient environment, speeding the growth rate by hormones and other things. But the beauty of it was the experiential imprinting. Gorgeously healthy creatures; you have no idea how much care they received.”

“I once spent a summer on a cattle farm,” Rydra said shortly.

The Baron’s nod was brisk. “We’d used the experiential imprints before, so we knew what we were doing. But never to synthesize completely the life situation of, say, a sixteen-year-old human. Sixteen was the physiological age we brought them to in six months. Look for yourself what a splendid specimen it is. The reflexes are fifty percent above those of a human aged normally. Human musculature is beautifully engineered: a three-day-starved, six-month-atrophied myasthenia gravis case, can, with the proper stimulant drugs, overturn a ton-and-a-half automobile. It will kill him—but that’s still remarkable efficiency. Think what the biologically perfect body, operating at all times at point nine-nine efficiency, could accomplish in physical strength alone.”

“I thought hormone growth incentive had been outlawed. Doesn’t it reduce the life span some drastic amount?”

“To the extent we used it, the life span reduction is seventy-five percent and over.” He might have smiled the same way watching some odd animal at its incomprehensible antics. “But, Madam, we are making weapons. If TW-55 can function twenty years at peak efficiency, then it will have outlasted the average battle cruiser by five years. But the experiential imprinting! To find among ordinary men someone who can function as a spy, is willing to function as a spy, you must search the fringes of neurosis, often psychosis. Though such deviations might mean strength in a particular area, it always means an overall weakness in the personality. Functioning in any but that particular area, a spy may be dangerously inefficient. And the Invaders have psyche-indices too, which will keep the average spy out of anyplace we might want to put him. Captured, a good spy is a dozen times as dangerous as a bad one. Post-hypnotic suicide suggestions and the like are easily gotten around with drugs; and are wasteful. TW-55 here will register perfectly normal on a psyche integration. He has about six hours of social conversation, plot synopses of the latest novels, political situations, music, and art criticism—l believe in the course of an evening he is programmed to drop your name twice, an honor you share only with Ronald Quar. He has one subject on which he can expound with scholarly acumen for an hour and a half—this one, I believe, is ‘haptoglobin groupings among the marsupials.’ Put him in formal wear and he will be perfectly at home at an ambassadorial ball or a coffee break at a high-level government conference. He is a crack assassin, expert with all the weapons you have seen up till now, and more. TW-55 has twelve hours’ worth of episodes in fourteen different dialects, accents, or jargons concerning sexual conquests, gambling experiences, fisticuff encounters, and humorous anecdotes of semi-illegal enterprises, all of which failed miserably. Tear his shirt, smear grease on his face and slip a pair of overalls on him, and he could be a service mechanic on any one of a hundred spaceyards or stellarcenters on the other side of the Snap. He can disable any space drive system, communications components, radar works, or alarm system used by the Invaders in the past twenty years with little more than—”

“Six inches of vanadium wire?”

The Baron smiled. “His fingerprints and retina pattern, he can alter at will. A little neural surgery has made all the muscles of his face voluntary, which means he can alter his facial structure drastically. Chemical dyes and hormone banks beneath the scalp enable him to color his hair in seconds, or, if necessary, shed it completely and grow a new batch in half an hour. He’s a past master in the psychology and physiology of coercion.”

“Torture?”

“If you will. He is totally obedient to the people whom he has been conditioned to regard as his superiors; totally destructive toward what he has been ordered to destroy. There is nothing in that beautiful head even akin to a superego.”

“He is…” and she wondered at herself speaking, “beautiful.” The dark-lashed eyes with lids about to quiver open, the broad hands hung at the naked thighs, fingers half-curled, about to straighten or become a fist. The display light was misty on the tanned, yet near-translucent skin. “You say this isn’t a model, but really alive?”

“Oh, more or less. But it’s rather firmly fixed in something like a yoga trance, or a lizard’s hibernation. I could activate it for you—but it’s ten to seven. We don’t want to keep the others waiting at the table now, do we?”

She looked away from the figure in glass to the dull, taut skin of the Baron’s face. His jaw, beneath his faintly concave cheek, was involuntarily working on its hinge.

(from Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany)