Lilith: A Snake in the Grass flotd-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Are they—still alive?” I asked, hesitant, a little fearful of his answers.

  He nodded. “Oh, yes, very much so. These are pawn girls who’ve shown flashes of strong power, usually right around puberty, but have proved incapable of repeating it, or at least of doing anything by force of will. Between their first and twelfth menstrual periods girls undergo physiochemical changes far more radical than do boys at the same stage in their lives. Since a lot of these chemical changes trigger Warden phenomena, we tend to monitor all the young girls in the Keep at that stage. In these girls it was exceptionally strong, as you might guess from their highly overdeveloped bodies.”

  “I thought you did that,” I blurted, then tried to cover. “I knew one of these girls. That’s why I’m so interested.” At least that much was the truth.

  He appeared to be a little surprised, but accepted the statement without further thought. “Oh, no. The condition’s a by-product. I believe that during this critical change in the body, the Warden organism gets confused, misfires, or receives the wrong instructions —or misinterprets the chemical stimuli it does receive. Not all girls experience this, by any means. One in a hundred, at best, and out of these, one in another hundred show strong power and bodily mis-development. Those are the ones we test and measure and keep a close watch on, although the very unpredictability of the power during that stage limits me. I could be killed or maimed during such an involuntary exercise of the power, and though I’m willing to risk it, Sir Tiel is not. Therefore we leave them in pawn’ villages until the danger is past. Which one did you know, by the way?”

  I pointed to Ti. “That one, over there.”

  “Oh, of course. She’s the newest, so it’s most likely. I’m still doing a preliminary analysis on her, so I can’t say much as yet, but she had die most potential of any I’ve seen. All sorts of phenomena around her, including the most severe. Among other things, she crippled half a dozen people around her, including her mother.”

  I shook my head in wonder. Little Ti a crippler? It didn’t seem possible, I told myself. Still, it made me slightly uneasy, too. I’d slept with her a great deal in the past few months, and if she’d still had any of that wild power I could have been harmed, too.

  “What are you doing with them now?” I wanted to know.

  “Testing and measurement, as I said,” Pohn replied. “All Masters and above have the power to see within others. Rank is mostly a matter of fine-tuning your reception, you might say, in our little society. A Supervisor senses, and therefore controls, only the total organism. You killed Kronlon, it’s true, but you couldn’t discriminate enough to affect just, say, his arm. I can isolate even more than that, much more. What I used to do with microscopes and microsurgery techniques I can now do without any mechanical aid. By concentration and study I can actually follow a single white blood cell completely through the circulatory system—and divert it, slow it, alter it, even destroy it. You can sense the Warden organism in everything, can’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, imagine being able to isolate individual cells in any organism. That’s what a Master can. do. Naturally, without my medical training they’d have no idea what they were doing, so my knowledge gives me the edge here. Masters have different skills based on knowing what they are looking for and what they want to accomplish. All the power of a Marek Kreegan will do you no good at all if you don’t have the knowledge and the fine touch, the skill or art, to make full use of it. That’s why you see the power used so often for purely destructive ends. To destroy something is easy and requires far less knowledge or skill.”

  I could see his point, and thought that many doctors back on the civilized worlds would envy his power as much as he envied their technology. To be able to look into the human body, to focus on any part of it one wanted, to study it at will in the most exacting and intimate ways possible—none but sophisticated medical computers Outside could accomplish anything like it, and the doctors and technicians controlling them had to trust them, never knowing exactly what it was the computers saw as they probed and analyzed.

  Pohn, however, knew.

  “They’re so still,” I noted. “Drugged?”

  He shook his head. “Oh my, no! That would simply complicate things. No, I simply applied a block to certain areas of the brain, one I can remove at will. They go into deep coma and I can then study them, probe, do whatever I want or need to do. Of the batch, I’m looking for ones with key enzymes in sufficient quantities perhaps to trigger the power. Those I’ll work with until I feel I can trigger them at will; then I’ll start trying to educate and train them as best we can. Kria there, for example, can now dissolve solid rock at my command.” He pointed at one girl near the door.

  I frowned. I had a bad, uneasy feeling about all this and about Pohn in general. Why was a doctor like this on Lilith at all? I asked myself. Did he perhaps have an unhealthy fondness for little girls? Or did he perhaps experiment capriciously on such people back Outside? I knew him now, although I’d never met him or heard of him before. There have always been people like Dr. Pohn in human history, the monsters whose thirst for experimentation caused a total disregard for any concept of morality. Shades of the old story about the man who’d created a bloodthirsty monster, leaving the question of who truly was the monster—the thing, or the man who created it?

  These young girls—reduced to zombies, biological specimens, perhaps playthings for this man’s sport. I thought of Ti in his hands and didn’t like what I was thinking at all. Still, I said nothing of my feelings. Instead I asked, “I assume you’re trying breeding experiments, too?”

  He nodded. “Oh, yes. Based on the idea that the proper chemical in the proper amount is an inherited and inheritable characteristic. Frankly, I doubt it is more than one in many factors, but Sir Tiel is obsessed with the idea. I’m afraid that his level of biological sophistication is about on a par with the belief of spontaneous generation, but what can I do? I work for the man, and he’s a skillful and able administrator. I humor him; he indulges me. What’s the harm?”

  What’s the harm? 1 thought sourly. What, indeed? As long as you didn’t regard any of these girls as more than lumps of flesh, no higher or lower than the great insects raised and bred in the Keep. That was the barbarity at the core of this civilization, I told myself. Only a select few were people.

  Precisely the underlying philosophy you’d expect on a world run by the most brilliant criminal masterminds humanity had spawned. Men like Dr. Pohn, sociopathic and probably psychopathic—and men like Cal Tremon, pirate and mass murderer, I reminded myself.

  “We really have to ring for Artur now,” Pohn said, turning and leaving the chamber. I followed him. “I’m afraid I’ve taken much too long with you, and it doesn’t pay to get him too angry.”

  “This Artur—what did he do? Outside, I mean?”

  “To get here?” the doctor chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know the details. He was somebody very big in the Confederacy military hierarchy, I think. A general, maybe, or an admiral. Ignited the atmosphere of some planet years ago, as I remember. Killed a few billion people. Something like that. Always said he was scape-goated for doing somebody else’s dirty work. That’s all I know. A nasty man, though.”

  I had to agree. Killed a few billion people…

  Given enough time I’d remember who he was, I was sure of that. I’d also remember that the comment on the death toll meant as little to Dr. Pohn as if the death toll had been in cockroaches.

  Chapter Eleven

  Choosing a Different Road

  Master Artur was prompt and didn’t seem the least put-out. He was just as cold and mean as always, with no trace of anything more or less. I began to wonder if the man were human.

  For the next hour or so we went on a tour of the Castle, armed with a nicely drawn map that Artur handed to me. The place was very logically laid out more or less in a D shape, with corridors fanning out in all directions to main function halls and rooms, each o
f which were also connected in the rear semicircle by service passages. Along each corridor were living quarters, storage, and other necessities, including group bathrooms. The corridors were arranged somewhat on a caste basis, with the bulk of them devoted to the Supervisor class that did the real work 01 the place, then the two on either side of the central passage for Master rank, and the center of course leading to Sir Tiel’s luxurious quarters and those of his immediate family.

  Not shown on the map, I noticed, were the inevitable secret passages between rooms and those perhaps above and below as well, such as the one from which they spied on me. Their absence didn’t surprise me, but I decided that I really wanted to know more about them.

  Outside the Castle Artur’s pride and joy was quartered in a large compound against the side of the hills. It was almost a stockade, made of great logs with catwalks and guard towers that reminded me of some primitive fortress. Artur had been totally cold, dry, and formal during our tour and seemed distant from everything and everybody, but now he seemed to warm and those chilly eyes lit up.

  “Not a part of the regular tour,” he told me, “but I have to go down and check them out anyway, so you might as well come along.”

  “Them” turned out to be enclosed herds of great insects the likes of which I had not really seen before on Lilith or anywhere else. Trained Supervisor-grade personnel scurried about when Artur approached, so by the time we entered the huge compound they were all set and waiting for him. Lines of them, rows and rows of them, in tight quarters but nonetheless mighty impressive.

  They sat there in formation, huge wuks, as they were called, their bodies a bright green with a whitish underbelly; they were fully three or four meters long on six thick, powerful bent legs, their heads dominated by great luminous ovoid eyes flanking a curled, whip like proboscis that concealed a nasty, beaklike mouth. Their skins were perfectly smooth, but I got the impression of a strong skeleton just beneath that made them far less fragile than they looked.

  Each had a saddle tied to it between the first and second pair of legs; it was an elaborate seat with a hard back and an X-shaped restraint to cover their riders and hold them in. The riders, in black pants and boots, were both male and female, but all looked tough, hard, and well-disciplined. There was an array of what I could only guess were weapons, from pikes and staffs to what might very well have been blow-guns. They were situated-so that the restrained rider could get at them easily and quickly.

  “I am impressed,” I told Artur (and-1 wasn’t kidding). “But this looks like an army to me—mounted cavalry. I wouldn’t think you’d need an army here.” Artur chuckled. “Oh, yes, indeed we do,” he responded. “You see, basically in order to move up in this society you have to kill somebody—be stronger than they were. Now, you tell me—it you were Sir Tiel, would you keep going day after day in challenges against everybody who thinks he can knock you off? Of course not And neither do any of the other knights. And what do you get for it? A lot of bowing and scraping, of course, but mostly a shitload of administrative headaches. There are probably hundreds of masters stronger than most of the knights, maybe even stronger than the Duke himself, but they just don’t want the job. A lot do, though. So I’m charged with seeing that it’s a bit more difficult to challenge the Knight of the Keep—a policeman, you might say. And if one knight wants something another knight has, well, they can challenge knight to knight —but they’d probably end up either dead or in a draw, so there’s no profit in it. So we fight a little. Anybody who wants anything from this Keep has to either bargain for it in a nice way or fight for it—and that’s where these troops come in.”

  I nodded, my view of Lilith changing a bit once more. At first I couldn’t see why they’d have fighting on a local scale, but then I realized that it was the safety valve, you might say. These squabbles tended to keep the most dangerous of people on Lilith—the psychopaths, war-lovers, violence-prone troublemakers, that sort—occupied. If they liked to beat one another’s brains in, give them a forum for doing so, an outlet for their violence that didn’t mess up the nice, neat system. I could see an astute administrator, particularly one with a lot of troublesome, violence-prone people, actually starting a war with a neighbor now and again just to relieve the tension—and perhaps the boredom.

  “The wuks,” Artur was saying, “use those big hind legs of theirs to leap high into the ah- it they want to, with the soldier aboard. That’s why the people are strapped hi, hut have their arms free. They can jump behind static ground lines with ease, making fixed fortifications useless. Up on the hill, there—you can see all those holes, almost like a honeycomb—are my besils, swift flyers that are, so to speak, my air force. Combine them with ground troops and you have a force that, properly employed, is almost invincible.” He said that last not in a bragging tone but with the ring of truth and conviction about it. The key phrase was “properly employed.” I had no doubt that Artur was one hell of a good field general.

  A neat system, I had to admit. The knights, fat and comfortable, didn’t want to challenge each other. The lack of any kind of instant communication meant that the acquisition of large areas, the consolidation of Keeps under one rule, would be difficult and profitless to maintain. And any challenger to the knight would first have to get past the Castle and its defenses—no mean feat. No matter what power anybody had, an arrow or spear would still kill him if it landed properly —would kill even Marek Kreegan himself.

  I could just see knights sitting around at parties given by one or another of them making bets on whose army was best, whose commander was most skilful. I was willing to bet that Artur had won a lot of those wagers.

  We walked back to the Castle after Artur’s formal inspection. Off in the distance I could see the pawns, countless numbers of them, working in the fields and tending the herds. Only then did I think of them on an emotional level. I had been out there only a day before, yet already the social gulf separating us was an almost solid, unpenetrable barrier. There seemed something wrong about that and something profound, as well, that said a lot about the ruling classes and the ruled; but I couldn’t put my finger on it Still, I was closer to them than to people like Artur and Pohn. But I was no match for the lowest, stupidest supervisor stablehand in the place.

  We went to the supervisors’ dining hall, and I suddenly realized how hungry I was. It had been many hours since that light breakfast, and even though I’d done little to work anything off, I was used to a lot more bulk.

  “I will leave you here,” Artur told me. “For the next few days, you have die run of the Castle. Relax, talk to people, learn the system. When we’re ready, you’ll start classes to see how your power can be developed.” His furry brows narrowed a little and he looked at me hard. “Don’t get too cocksure in those classes, boy. Remember, it’s not just a test of power and will but an intelligence test, too. Remember where Kronlon wound up.” And with that he was gone.

  I was dimly aware that I had been given a kindness by this strange, aristocratic man. I pondered his words as I ate heartily the best meal I’d had in months, and I think I understood what he was saying.

  They wanted you to develop what powers you had, of course, the better to fit into the system and serve the bosses. But suppose you did too well. If you proved out stronger than a Master, say, would your host and boss suffer you to live? Not likely. But it wouldn’t do to slack, either—or you would wind up out in the muck with the pawns. Tricky indeed, this social system.

  I spent the next couple of days making friends with some of the Castle staff, exploring the Castle and its many byways and learning what I could about the passages, somewhat euphemistically referred to as “service corridors,” not shown on the maps. From casual friendships I learned several things I had to know, not the least of which was that the party held the night I’d arrived on the scene was in honor of Marek Kreegan himself, in on one of his surprise tours. Nobody had seen him—not even those who served at the fete could say what the Lord of Lilith l
ooked like. I had the strong impression that not even the man who owned the place knew which of his guests was Kreegan, whose powers to cloud minds was legendary and whose passion for anonymity was absolute. Duke Kosaru was the nominal guest of honor, but they all knew that Kreegan had been there.

  Was he still here? I couldn’t help but wonder and looked suspiciously at all those of Master class I came in contact with who were not obviously of Zeis Keep.

  I also dropped in on Medical from time to time, mostly to see what, if anything, was to happen to those girls on the slabs, particularly Ti. I could hardly understand my fixation with her; in the past I’d always been coldly detached toward sexual partners and even friends. Most were shallow individuals anyway, and those who weren’t were a danger to me of one sort or another, as I might have been set after one or another of the exceptional ones at some point. That worried me, really, since I always had such a clear idea of who I was, what I wanted, and what my place in the universe was.

  Cal Tremon, what was your body making me into? Was I in fact no longer immune from the emotional factors I always believed had set me apart from the rest of humanity?

  Most of my attempts to see Pohn failed. He was a busy man, it seemed, and hard to catch in any one spot. A doctor on a world where nobody got sick and where almost all injuries healed themselves perfectly or regenerated what was missing had a lot of time for research, and I knew some of the directions that research was taking. I did learn from his assistants that he was responsible for the super creatures of Artur’s force, selective breeding and genetic manipulation by sheer force of will alone accomplishing wonders. Anybody that godlike could hardly resist doing the same to people.

  I did catch him in one afternoon, though, and he was happy to see me. Apparently I was one of the few who seemed truly interested in his work, but I realized I was treading on eggshells around him. In his own way he was at least as dangerous as Artur, if only because his powers were more far-reaching and far more subtle.