The Morphodite
Author: M. A. Foster
Published: December, 1981 by DAW
Cover Artist: Michael Whelan
Publisher Blurb (DAW edition): How do you destroy a conspiracy without making waves? Because every such underground movement has a key person, the subtle way is to remove that keystone and watch the rest of the organization fall apart.
Their world was ultra-conservative, isolated, opposed to change. Their secret police had tried many means to keep it that way. Now they had contrived their cleverest secret weapon. This was a genetically-patterned, laboratory-raised human genius, the Morphodite.
The Morphodite needed no computers to detect the key to any conspiracy-- the know-how was structured into his/her brain. The Morphodite needed no assistance to make a foolproof escape after such an assassination. The know-how was built into his/her body.
But the Morphodite had one defect its "gestapo" parents had not planned. He/she could think for itself. And its thoughts were total subversion.
A startling concept by the acclaimed author of THE GAMEPLAYERS OF ZAN.
Notes: First book in the Morphidite trilogy, followed by Transformer. This is one that would have benefitted from better editing. Intended to be a more cerebral story, it ends up feeling very unpolished, slow, and disjointed; the philosophy gets drowned out in awkward and sometimes nonsensical dialogue. Interesting concepts are thrown out and never revisited, giving way to further plodding dialogue or description. Stylistically, this work feels derivative of Jack Vance. For all its disappointments, it's an interesting and unusual book.
Summary: What if turning points in history did not depend on an obvious key player, but rather on the day-to-day activities of someone far more ordinary? Pternam doesn't believe it, but this is the proposition on which he trains his new genetically-engineered assassin. Rael, a genetically and biologically altered human being, possesses the abilities to calculate a keystone in the present moment, efficiently assassinate that person, and then enact the perfect getaway: through a voluntary but challenging process of metamorphosis, this living weapon can change gender, appearance, and even age.
The Morphodite opens on the continent of Lisagor on the planet Oerlikon, in a society founded on the principle of changelessness. Conservative in the extreme, dissidents are lobotomized, modified in secretive labs, and repurposed as fearless weapons. Those who are more quietly unhappy might find themselves solitary wanderers, living mostly in the wilderness to forage for a protein-rich plant that has so far resisted attempts at domestication but which remains a valuable food source; these wanderers sacrifice all social standing for what little freedom and independence may be granted in such a society. Meanwhile, residents in the city relieve the tension of this stifling culture via the violent and chaotic sport of Dragon (a little like buzkashi played on foot instead of horseback, maybe), where death of individual players is an unsurprising outcome.
Three major political players hold Lisagor in precarious balance: those who want change, those who want things to stay the same, and a hidden cohort of interstellar visitors studying what makes a nation like this work. Against this background, a middle-aged man named Rael, formerly the elderly woman Jedily, comes on to the scene as the ultimate in changeability. Created under the leadership of Luto Pternam in the monstrous 'Mask Factory' where people are lobotomized and morphed into unfeeling, unfearing, unthinking soldiers, Rael agrees to play assassin in exchange for his freedom. Not understanding why his target is his target, he is still able to calculate who that target is, and when to seize the moment. Boarding a train with the wanderer Meliosme with whom he forms an instant rapport, he identifies his target and quietly executes him. Leaving the youth dead on a train, he flees to a hostel with Meliosme, whom he urges to retreat into the wilderness lest association with him bring her to harm. Now alone, he initiates his transformation into Damistofia, apparently late twenties or early thirties, and is placed into long-term medical care. Here she becomes something of an administrative difficulty as she lacks identifying papers. While Damistofia recuperates, sheltered from the fallout of her choices as Rael, the world outside the hospital crumbles around the death of her target. She is then befriended and seduced by her own assassin, whom she takes out in a calculated move during a game of Dragon, and after which she must initiate change again-- this time urgently and in far from ideal circumstances. Damistofia becomes the juvenile boy Phaedrus, who wakes up in a wasteland outside of any city, where, after a time of respite, he meets up by chance with the woman Meliosme whom he briefly met as Rael. Together they move on and create a small community, which they eventually leave for life in a stabilizing city. Meanwhile, the interstellar anthropologists, who have, it turns out, been working to keep the system changeless themselves, flee that world; Pternam attempts to secure passage and, falsely granted such, is jettisoned into space.