Lilith: A Snake in The Grass

by Jack L. Chalker

  Kronlon watched, a look of amused satisfaction on his face. He had done this many times before. I hated him worse than I ever hated anyone in my life.

  But he still wasn’t through.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Tre—Tremon,” I gasped. “Cal Tremon.”

  The agony was back, knocking me down again; then it was released.

  “Get up!” the supervisor commanded. I tried to get back to my feet once more, making it on the second try. He waited patiently until I succeeded.

  “Now, you’ll address me as ‘sir’ always,” he warned. “You will put ‘sir’ at the beginning of every statement to me, and you will put ‘sir’ at the end of it You will stand straight when I am around and face me always, and when you are given an order you will bow slightly and then do it. You will speak to anyone not of your class only when spoken to, and only in reply to their questions or commands. Understand that?”

  I was still gasping for breath. “Yes … sir,” I responded. The pain returned.

  “Not what I ordered, Tremon! What kind of a dumb shit are you? Now get up, you bastard, and we’ll try it again.”

  For a moment I was confused, hesitant, until I realized he was deadly serious. The pain and agony he could inflict without moving a muscle was horrible, intense. By now I feared that more than anything, the memory so vivid that I would do almost anything to avoid it. It was horrible to know that I had been so easily humbled and beaten, so quickly broken—but broken I was. I wasn’t even thinking straight any more. I just wanted to avoid that pain.

  We spent what felt like hours out in that field, with quick applications of the pain followed by increasing demands, over and over again, a terrible torturer’s delight. It was a process not unfamiliar to me, but one in which I’d never participated on the receiving end. Keep at the victim: administer pain, then demands, then pain again. Never be pleased, never be satisfied.

  Agents were trained to black out after a certain threshold was reached, but I found even that suddenly beyond my power. Agents could also will themselves to death, of course, but that was the one point at which he was not going to win, not yet.

  If I were being interrogated about a mission, or jeopardizing a mission, other people, anything, I would not have hesitated to take the death-wish route—but such was not the case. Nor was any torture mechanism being used—just one short, squat, brutish man standing there in a field, doing nothing at all.

  As Kronlon had warned, there were only two routes for any thinking human being to take in this situation—death, or absolute, unquestioning obedience. My ego shattered in the waning sun, and my will seemed to recede into nothingness. Before sunset I was, on command, licking his stinking, dirty feet.

  As we rode into the small village, me sitting dully at his side, a small corner of the old me, all that seemed to remain on the conscious level, kept saying over and over, “And a Master is ten times as powerful as a Supervisor and a Knight is ten times a Master and a Duke is ten times a Knight and a Lord is like a god ….”

  I don’t even remember entering the little village of straw and mud huts. It was nearly sunrise when I awoke.

  Chapter Five

  Village Routine

  The pawns lived a miserably primitive life, I soon discovered, sleeping crammed into those huts with only more of the strawlike bunti plant that formed the hut covering the floor so deeply that it actually gave slightly under the weight of human bodies.

  For several days I remained in nearly complete withdrawal, going through the motions like an automaton, thinking little and feeling nothing. The other pawns seemed to understand what a newcomer went through,’ even though most of them were native-born and had been raised on this horrible system and probably hadn’t gone through quite what I had. There was no attempt to rush me, or to establish normal contact with me. They seemed content to wait until I snapped out of it, if I ever did, and initiated the contact myself.

  We were routed out at dawn, and everybody crowded into a huge communal eating area in the center of the “village,” as it were, where food-service pawns put out enormous, mostly tasteless rolls and a fair supply of good-tasting pulpy yellow fruit Then the supervisor arrived; actually, he lived right there, in a hut just like the rest of us, only privately. But his food, the same as ours, was served to him by the food-service pawns in his hut—and someone would clean the place while work was being done.

  Incredibly, despite the enormous power Kronlon possessed, on Lilith he was only a slight notch, just a hair really, above us, the lowest of the low. Just one look at his modest bunti hut and that castle up on the mountain told of the gulf separating him from his own bosses.

  The work consisted mostly of loading and hauling. How soft mankind has become, even on the frontier. On Lilith, life was frozen in the stone age: all labor was manual; all tools were crudely fashioned and usually temporary.

  Two rivers flowed from the mountains down to those small lakes, causing the twin problems of flood control and irrigation. It rained heavily at some point almost every day, yet the duration was short, the runoff quick. The mountains clearly absorbed the brunt of the storms on their other faces and allowed only the worst to get over to Zeis Keep. Therefore irrigation canals had to be dug by hand; the mud and muck was carried out by hand to carts, then hauled by men pulling those carts to fill areas near the lakes, where the silt would be formed into crude earthen dikes. Hundreds of kilometers of drainage and irrigation canals were constantly silting up; so when you finished the whole route, it was time to start again.

  Men and women worked equally in the fields and in those jobs. Of course the strongest and hardiest took on the heaviest labor, and job assignment was clearly based on physique, age, and the like. Children—some as young as five or six I guessed—worked along with their elders, doing what they could under the watchful eyes of the oldest and most infirm. The social system was crude and primitive but well thought out. It worked, on the most basic, tribal level. Once, when mankind evolved on its mother world into what we now know as human beings, all people must have lived something like this.

  Days were long, punctuated regularly by very short breaks and by four food breaks during the sixteen-hour work cycle. When darkness finally fell across the valley and the distant castle blazed with light was there rest. But the nights, too, were long. Zeis Keep was only 5 degrees south of the equator, which made the periods roughly equal all year.

  Social time for the pawns was at night, and it was as basic and primitive as everything else. They had some dances and songs, for anybody who was in any condition to join in, and they talked and gossiped in an elementary way. They also made love then, seemingly without regard for any family unit or other permanent attachments. Marriage and such seemed alien concepts to these people, though if both partners felt like it, they married.

  They were a lively, yet somewhat tragic group, largely ignorant of anything beyond then- own miserable existence, which they accepted as normal and natural because they knew nothing else. So thoroughly ingrained was the system that I cannot recall a single instance in which a supervisor had to exercise his or her terrible powers.

  As for me, I was in a curious state of mental catalepsy. I functioned, did my job as ordered, ate and slept, but basically didn’t think. Looking back on the period now, I can see the reasons and understand, although I can’t really forgive myself. It was not the defeat at Kronlon’s hands or the crushing blow to my ego and pride that was inexcusable. What bothers me, really, is that I retreated into being a mental vegetable at the end of the contest.

  I don’t know how long I remained that way—days, weeks; it was hard to be sure, since there are no watches or calendars on Lilith. Still, slowly my mind struggled for some kind of control, some sort of re-assertion of identity—first in dreams, then in fleeting memories. The real danger in this situation was that I could have gone mad, could have retreated into some sort of fantasy world or unreal existence. I realize now that the inner st
ruggle was caused by compulsions placed on me by the Security Clinic programmers. They were not ones to take chances, and they could always program another body—but once a body was programmed and sent to the Warden System, they had to make sure it would remain true to them.

  Find the aliens … kill the Lord ….

  These commands echoed in my dreams and became the supports to which other parts of my shattered ego could cling.

  Find the aliens … kill the Lord .…

  Slowly, very slowly, night after night another fragment would return and coalesce around those deeply hidden commands, commands I might never have known were there had this not occurred.

  Find the aliens … kill the Lord .…

  And rationality finally returned to me. In the evening hours and just before falling asleep, I was able to try to sort out just what the hell had happened to me, to regain some of my confidence. I needed hope, and the only hope I could have was in reasoning a way out of my predicament.

  The logic chain I forged may have been faulty, but it worked, and that alone was important. First and foremost was the realization that everyone who came here had undergone substantially the same treatment I had. It had cowed them all, driven them into some sort of grudging submission from which they’d had to learn to cope. Was that insanity, or perhaps a fatalistic acceptance?

  Patra, that Knight up there in his fairyland castle, even Lord Marek Kreegan. There were no inherited positions or titles on Lilith, except perhaps for those skilled in things useful to the rulers. No political position, no position of authority, was hereditary or elected, either. All those positions, from Supervisor up to Lord, had been taken, won in a contest of power. Find the aliens … kill the Lord … Everyone on this world who rose at all from the muck of pawn slavery rose from the bottom through the ranks. Everyone.

  How did this power operate? How did you find out if you had it?

  I felt ashamed of myself for my reaction to Kronlon. I had been in bad situations before, situations in which the enemy had all the power, and I had been stalled only temporarily by those conditions. The only difference between those situations and this one was that in this one I had looked at the lay of the land and the forces of the enemy, and instead of considering the problem and working out how to beat the enemy—or at least die trying—I had instead meekly surrendered. The day I faced and accepted the fact that I had run across a tremendously powerful obstacle, not an impassable barrier, was the day I rejoined the human race.

  I started talking to people, although that was a pretty limited thing. Few topics for small talk were available—the weather was always hot and humid, for example—and it was difficult to talk down to people who might be bright and alert but whose whole world was this primitive, nonmechanized existence. What could you say to people whose world view, if they had one, was that the valley was the world and the sun rose and set around it? Oh, they knew there were other Keeps, but they saw them all as being just like this one. And as for mechanization, they had seen the shuttle come and go, but that was as far as it went —after all, they were familiar with large flying insects.

  The concept of any machine not powered by muscle was simply beyond them.

  That was the core of my problem. I didn’t know enough, not by a long shot, but I knew a hell of a lot more than these natives. Also, now that I’d pulled myself together, I craved some kind of intelligent conversation. I’d always been a loner before, but there is a difference between being alone by choice and being alone by force. Conversation and diversion had always been available when I had needed it. Everything seemed stacked against me. I hadn’t gotten a single break on this whole mission since waking up. But I did get one now.

  Her name was Ti.

  A few days after my recovery I encountered her in the village common one evening, after the last meal of the day. I had seen her a few times before, and once you saw her you couldn’t forget her.

  She was about 160 centimeters tall and very thin, particularly at the waist, but she had large breasts and nice buttocks and sandy brown hair—unusual in itself—down to those buttocks. A pretty, sexy young woman, you might say—except that her face was amazingly young and innocent, the kind of face not seen on a body like that in my experience. It was a pretty face, all wide-eyed and innocent. But it was the face of a child, one no more than eleven or twelve, atop that well-developed body. Though the two would eventually reconcile, the body seemed to be developing several years ahead of that face.

  I could have understood the contrast more if such a thing had been common on Lilith, but it was not—at least not from this pawn sample. Here was one minor mystery that perhaps I could learn something about, and I asked a couple of my co-workers about her.

  “Oh, that’s Ti,” one explained. “A chosen of the Bodymaster. He’ll pluck her in a little while, I’d say. Only thing that’s slowed it is that she’s got some wild talent in her and they want to see what it’ll do.”

  Several items of new data. I felt like I was on to something new, something that would be of value.

  “What do you mean, a chosen of the Bodymaster?” I asked. “Remember, I wasn’t born here.”

  The question got me one of those looks of incomprehension I was becoming used to, since the natives just couldn’t picture any other place as being any different than Zeis Keep. But the man shrugged and answered anyway. They had reconciled themselves to me by convincing themselves that the shock to my system, which they could comprehend, had made me funny in the head.

  “Boss Tiel, he breeds women like he breeds snarks,” the laborer explained. Snarks were those hairy monsters in the pasture that were raised for their highly prized meat. “When a child, particularly a girl child, is born with looks or something else special, well, she gets marked by the Bodymaster in charge of the breeding. He brings ‘em along ‘til they’re the way he wants ‘em, then he breeds ‘em with selected boys. See?”

  I did see, sort of, although the concept repelled me more than anything yet about this foul world. Repelled, but didn’t surprise.

  “But her—ah—development isn’t natural, is it?” I prompted.

  He chuckled and held up an index finger. “See this finger? I lost it—got chopped clean away—in an accident a while back. Bled like mad. They took me to the Bodymaster, who had only to look at it to stop the blood. Then he looked at it, touched it, and I came back. It grew back out in time, good as new. Look.” He wiggled it for emphasis.

  “But what does that …?” I began, then realized what he was saying and shook my head in wonder. He caught my look and grinned.

  “Breed stock needs to make lotsa babies, needs to want to make lotsa babies,” the man noted. “You see?”

  I saw, all right. Slowly, to make certain her cells and nervous system were capable of standing it, this Bodymaster was somehow reaching inside her with his power, in the same way as he had ordered the finger regenerated and as Kronlon had inflicted paralysis and pain. Subtle alterations were being made, had probably been made from the point of puberty, which could only have taken place a year or so ago. Hormones stimulated, body chemistry subtly altered, so that actually he was making her unnatural, his exaggeration deforming her somewhat—but all for his purposes. Breeding stock he wanted, not show stock. For what? The beautifully colored hair, perhaps? Possibly as little as that, although another thought came to me.

  “Hogi?” I prodded my laborer companion once again.

  “Uh?”

  “You said she had some wild talent. What kind? What can she do?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. Might not understand it, anyway. I do know that none of the Supers bother her much, not even Kronlon. A little scared, maybe, which may mean she’s got really great power—but it’s wild. Comes and goes. No control.”

  I nodded. That would explain why the powers that be had left her here a while after puberty instead of taking her into the main village or perhaps to the castle grounds. They weren’t quite sure what her powers were, either, or whe
ther she might not someday learn to control them. They wanted to see more, first, to ascertain what she could or could not do. They were afraid of her potential, which indicated great power. If it stayed wild, well, she’d become a breeder and that was that. But if she gained control, she could threaten them.

  I suspected that that was the real reason for this breeding program. It must frustrate that upper class to see their own children wind up as pawns, to have to pass on their splendor and holdings to some stranger or subordinate who would take it from them. For the first time I thought I understood people like the Masters and Knights. How galling, how frustrating it must be to be like a god and know that you can’t pass it on, leave it to anyone. Genetic manipulation was out, as were all the scientific tests and lab procedures of the civilized worlds. What bestowed and regulated that mysterious and terrifying Warden power had eluded technological science and would elude them as well. They would have no choice but to try and breed for it. First among themselves, of course, but that hadn’t worked.

  It struck me that, except for Patra, virtually all the powerful people I’d heard about were male. That might be a misleading statistic, based as it was on so small a sample, but if it held, even partly, it would mean even more problems in pure inbreeding.

  Hogi at least knew enough to answer that. “Well, yes, more men than women, but lots of women have it,” he assured me. “No, I hear tell that when a woman like a Master or a Duke gets with child, she loses control, becomes a wild talent while carrying the child. During that time somebody could steal her job, see?”

  I did see. With only a few thousand positions near the top and only 471 really at the top, people in those positions were always on the spot, always being challenged by newcomers—and to put yourself in the position of being wide open to challenge for nine months would be unthinkable.