Lilith: A Snake in the Grass flotd-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  For a while he floated in a sennhypnotic fog, but slowly images started forming in his brain as they had before. Only now they seemed more definite, clearer, more like his own thoughts. The drugs and small neural probes did their job. His own mind and personality receded, replaced by a similar, yet oddly different pattern.

  “The agent is commanded to report,” the computer ordered, sending the command deep into his own mind, a mind no longer his own.

  What would happen, or so the techs had advised him, would amount to a sort of total recall from the mind of his counterpart down below, information his own mind would sort, classify, and edit into a coherent narrative.

  Recorders clicked on.

  Slowly the man in the chair cleared his throat several times. It still took more than three hours to get him to do anything beyond mumbling some odd words or sounds, but the computers were nothing if not patient, knowing that the man’s mind was receiving a massive amount of data and was struggling to sort and classify it.

  Finally the man began to speak.

  Chapter One

  Rebirth

  After Krega’s talk and a little preparation to put my own affairs in order—this would be a long one—I checked into the Confederacy Security Clinic. I’d been here many times before, of course, but never knowingly for this purpose. Mostly, this was where they •programmed you with whatever information you’d need for a mission and where, too, you were reintegrated. Naturally, the kind of work I did was often extralegal, a term I prefer to illegal, which implies criminal intent—and much of it was simply too hot ever to be revealed. To avoid such risks, all agents had their own experience of a mission wiped from their minds when it involved sensitive matters.

  It may seem like a strange life, going about not knowing where you have been or what you’ve done, but it has its compensations. Because any potential enemy, military or political, knows you’ve been wiped, you can live a fairly normal, relaxed life outside of a mission structure. No purpose is served in coming after you—you have no knowledge of what you’ve done, or why, or for or to whom. In exchange for those blanks, an agent of the Confederacy lives a life of luxury and ease, with an almost unlimited supply of money, and with all the comforts supplied. I bummed around, swam, gambled, ate in the best restaurants, played a little semipro ball or cube—I’m pretty good, and it keeps me in shape. I enjoyed every minute of it, and except for my regular re-qualification training sessions—four- to six-week stints that resemble military basic training, only nastier and more sadistic—I felt no guilt at my playboy life. The training sessions are to make sure that your body and mind don’t turn soft from all that good living. Permanently implanted sensors constantly monitor and decide when you need a good refresher.

  I often wondered just how sophisticated those sensors were. The thought that a whole security staff might see all my debauchery and indiscretions used to worry me, but after a while I learned to ignore it.

  The life offered in trade is just too nice. Besides, what could I do about it? People on most civilized worlds these days had such sensors, although hardly to the degree and sophistication of mine. How else could a population so vast and spread out possibly be kept orderly, progressive, and otherwise peaceful?

  But when a mission came up you naturally couldn’t forgo all the past experience you’d had. A wipe without storage simply wouldn’t have been very practical, since a good agent gets better by not repeating his mistakes.

  So the first thing you did was go to the Security Clinic, where they stored everything you ever experienced, and get the rest of you put back so you would be whole for whatever they’d dreamed up this time.

  It always amazed me when I got up from that chair with my past fully restored. Even the clear memories of the things I’d done always amazed me, that I, of all people, had done this or that. The only difference this time, I knew, was that the process would be taken one step further. Not only would the complete “me” get up from that table, but the same memory pattern would be impressed on other minds, other bodies—as many as needed until a “take” was achieved.

  I wondered what they’d be like, those four other versions of myself. Physically different, probably—the kind of offender they got here wasn’t usually from one of the civilized worlds, where people had basically been standardized in the name of equality. No, these people would come from the frontier, from the traders, and miners and freebooters who existed at the edge of expansion, and who were necessary in an expanding culture, since a high degree of individuality, self-reliance, originality, and creativity was required in the dangerous situations in which they lived. A stupid government would have eliminated all such, but a stupid government degenerates or loses its vitality and potential for growth by standardization.

  That, of course, was the original reason for the Warden Diamond Reserve. Some of these hard-frontier types are so individualistic that they become a threat to the stability of the civilized worlds. The trouble is, anybody able to loosen the bonds that hold our society together is most likely the smartest, nastiest, meanest, cleverest, most original sort of mind humanity can produce—and therefore not somebody who should be idly wiped clean. The Diamond could effectively trap people of this sort forever, allowing them continued creative opportunities which, when properly monitored, might still produce something of value for the Confederacy—if only an idea, a thought, a way of looking at something that nobody else could come up with.

  And the felons down there were naturally anxious to please as well, since the alternative was death. Eventually, such creative minds made themselves indispensable to the Confederacy and ensured their continued survival.

  The damned probe hurt like hell. Usually there was just some tingling followed by a sensation much like sleep, and you woke up a few minutes later in the chair once again yourself. This tune the tingling became a painful physical force that seemed to enter my skull and bounce around, then seize control of my head. It was as if a huge, giant hand had grabbed my brain and squeezed, then released, then squeezed again in excruciating pulses. Instead of drifting off to sleep, I passed out.

  I woke up and groaned slightly. The throbbing was gone, but the memory was still all too current and all too vivid. It was several minutes, I think, before I found enough strength to sit up.

  The old memories flooded back, and again I amazed myself by recalling many of my past exploits. I wondered if my surrogate selves would get similar treatment, considering that they couldn’t be wiped after this mission as I could. That realization caused me to make a mental note that those surrogates would almost certainly have to be killed if they did have my entire memory pattern. Otherwise, a lot of secrets would be loose on the Warden Diamond and many in the hands of people who’d know just what sort of use to make of them.

  No sooner had I thought of that than I had the odd feeling of wrongness. I looked around the small room in which I’d awakened and realized immediately -the source of that feeling.

  This wasn’t the Security Clinic, wasn’t anyplace I’d ever seen before. It was a tiny cubicle, about twelve cubic meters total, including the slightly higher than normal ceiling. In it was a small cot on which I’d awakened, a small basin and next to it a standard food port, and in the wall, a pull-down toilet. That was it. Nothing else—or was there?

  I looked around and spotted the most obvious easily. Yes, I couldn’t make a move without being visually and probably aurally monitored. The door was almost invisible and there was certainly no way to open it from inside. I grasped immediately where I was.

  It was a prison cell.

  Far worse than that, I could feel a faint vibration that had no single source. The sensation wasn’t irritating; in fact it was so faint as to be hardly noticeable, but I knew what it was. I was aboard a ship, moving somewhere through space.

  I stood up, reeling a little bit from a slight bout of dizziness that soon passed, and looked down at my body. It was tremendously muscular, the body of a miner or some other sort of hea
vy laborer. There were a few scars on it that obviously had been treated by someone other than a meditech, and I recognized two of them as knife wounds.

  My entire body was almost covered in thick, coarse, black hair—more hair on my chest, arms, and legs than I’d ever seen on anything but an animal. I couldn’t help noticing, though, that I was better endowed sexually than I had believed humanly possible. I just stood there, stunned, for I don’t know how long.

  I’m not me! my mind screamed at me. I’m one of them—one of the surrogates/

  I sat back down on the cot, telling myself that it just wasn’t possible. I knew who I was, remembered every bit, every detail, of my life and work.

  My shock gave way after a while to anger—anger and frustration. I was a copy, an imitation of somebody else entirely, somebody still alive and kicking and perhaps monitoring my every move, my every thought. I hated that other then, hated him with a pathological force that was beyond reason. He would sit there comfortable and safe, watching me work, watching me do it all—and when it was over, he’d go home for debriefing, return to that easy life, while I…

  They were going to dump me on a world of the Warden-Diamond, trap me like some kind of master criminal, imprisoned there for the rest of my life—of this body’s life, anyway. And then? When my job was done? I’d said it myself upon awakening, passed my own sentence. The things I knew! I would be monitored at all times, of course. Monitored and killed if I blew any of those secrets. Killed anyway at the completion of the mission just for insurance.

  My training came into automatic play at that point, overriding the shock and. anger. I regained control and considered everything I knew.

  Monitor? Sure—more than ever. I recalled Krega saying that there was some sort of organic linkup. Are you enjoying this, you son of a bitch? Are you getting pleasure from vicariously experiencing my reaction?

  My training clicked on again, dampening me down. It didn’t matter, I told myself. First of all, I knew just what he must be thinking—and that was an advantage. He, of all people, would know that I would be a damned tough son of a bitch to kill.

  It was a shock to discover that you were not who you thought you were but some artificial creation. It was a shock, too, to realize that the old life, the life you remembered even if you personally didn’t experience it, was gone forever. No more civilized worlds, no more casinos and beautiful women and all the money you could spend. And yet as I sat there, I adjusted. That was what they picked men like me for from the start: we had the ability to adjust and adapt to almost anything.

  Although this was not my body, I was still me. Memory and thought and personality made up an individual, not his body. This was no more than a biological disguise, I told myself, of a particularly sophisticated sort. As to who was really me—-it seemed to me that this personality, these memories, were no more that other fellow’s than my own. Until I got up from that chair back in the Security Clinic I had really been somebody else anyway. A lot of me, my memories and training, had been missing. That old between-missions me was the artificial me, the created me, I thought. He, that nonentity playboy that currently did not exist, was the artificial personality. The real me was bottled up and stored in their psy-chosurgical computers and only allowed to come out when they needed it—and for good reason. Unleashed, I was as much a danger to the power structure as to whomever they set me against.

  And I was good. The best, Krega had called me. That’s why I was here now, in this body, in this cell, on this ship. And I wouldn’t be wiped and I wouldn’t be killed if I could help it. That other me, sitting there in the console—somehow I no longer hated him very much, no longer felt anything at all for him. When this was all over he’d be wiped once more—perhaps killed himself if my brother agents on the Diamond and I found out too much. At best he’d return to being that stagnant milquetoast.

  Me, on the other hand… Me, I would still be here, still live on, the real me. I would become more complete than he would.

  I was under no illusions, though. Kill me they would, if they could, if I didn’t do their bidding. They’d do it automatically, from robot satellite, and without a qualm. / would. But my vulnerability would last only until I mastered my new situation and my new and permanent home. I felt that with a deep sense of certainty, for I knew their methods and how they thought. I’d have to do their dirty work for them, and they knew it—but only until I could find a way around it. They could be beaten, even on their own turf. That was why they had people like me in the first place: to uncover those who expertly covered over their whole lives and activities, who managed to vanish totally from their best monitors—to uncover them and get them.

  But there’d be no new expert agent sent to get me if 7 beat them. They’d just be putting somebody else in the same position.

  I realized then, as they had undoubtedly figured, that I had no choice but to carry out the mission. Only as long as I was doing what they wanted would I be safe from them while still in that vulnerable stage. After that—well, we’d see.

  The thrill of the challenge took over, as it always did. The puzzle to be solved, the objectives to be accomplished. I like to win, which is even easier when you feel nothing about the cause, just the challenge of the problem and the opponent and the physical and intellectual effort necessary to meet that challenge. Find out about the alien menace. It no longer concerned me either way—I was trapped on a Warden world from now on anyway. If the aliens won the coming confrontation, the Wardens would survive as allies. If they lost, well, it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference, only continue the current situation.

  That meant the alien problem was purely an intellectual challenge, which made it perfect.

  The other objective created a similar situation. Seek out the Lord of that particular Diamond world and kill him if I could. In a sense accomplishing that would be more difficult, for I’d be operating on totally unfamiliar ground and would therefore require time and perhaps some allies. Another challenge. And if I got him, it could only increase my own power and position in the long term. If he got me instead, of course, that would solve everybody’s problem—but the thought of losing is abhorrent to me. That set the contest in the best terms, from my point of view. Track down assassination was the ultimate game, since either you won or you died and did not have to live with the thought that you lost.

  It suddenly occurred to me that the only real difference between me and a Lord of the Diamond was that I was working for the law and he—or she—against it. But no, that wasn’t right, either. On his world he was the law and I would be working against that. Fine. Dead heat on moral grounds.

  The only thing wrong at this point, I reflected, was that they were starting me at a tremendous disadvantage. The normal procedure was to program all pertinent information into my brain before setting me off on a mission—but they hadn’t done that this time. Probably, I thought, because they had me once on the table for four separate missions, and the transfer process, to a new body, was hard enough without trying to add anything afterward. Still, this method put me in a deep pit. I thought sourly that somebody should have thought of that.

  Somebody did, but it was a while before I discovered how. About an hour after I had awakened a little bell clanged near the food port and I went over to it. Almost instantly a hot tray appeared, along with a thin plastic fork and knife I recognized as the dissolving type. They’d melt into a sticky puddle in an hour or less, then dry up into a powder shortly after that. Standard for prisoners.

  The food was lousy, but I hadn’t expected better.

  The vitamin-enriched fruit drink with it, though, was pretty good; I made the most of it, keeping the thin, clear container (not the dissolving type) in case I wanted water later. Everything else I put back in the port, and it vaporized neatly. All nice and sealed.

  About the only thing they couldn’t control was bodily functions, and a half-hour or so after eating my first meal as a new man, you might say, nature called. On the far wa
ll was a panel marked “toilet” and a small pull ring. Simple, standard stuff. I pulled the ring, the thing came down—and damned if there wasn’t a small, paper-thin probe in the recess behind it. And so I sat on the John, leaned back against the panel, and got brief and relief at the same time.

  The thing worked by skin contact—don’t ask me how. I’m not one of the tech brains. It was not as good as a programming, but it enabled them to talk to me, even send me pictures that only I could see and hear.

  “By now I hope you’re over the shock of discovering who and what you are,” Krega’s voice came to me, seemingly forming in my brain. I was shocked when I realized that not even my jailers could hear or see a thing.

  “We have to brief you this way simply because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Oh, don’t worry about it—it’s permanent. But we prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock, and we haven’t the time to allow you to ‘set in’ completely, as it were. This method will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel you have the most difficult task of all four.”

  I felt the excitement rise in me. The challenge, the challenge…

  “Your objective world is Lilith, first of the Diamond colonies,” the commander’s voice continued. “Lilith is, scientifically speaking, a madhouse. There is simply no rational, scientific explanation for what you will find there. The only.thing that keeps all of us from going over the brink is that the place does have rules and is consistent within its own framework of logic. I will leave most of that to your orientation once you make planet fall. You will be met and briefed as a convict—along with the other inmates being sent there with you—by representatives of the Lord of Lilith, and that will be more effective than anything I can give you second-hand.