Lilith: A Snake in The Grass

by Jack L. Chalker

  With all my muscles I could pound pretty good, and somebody did eventually hear the pounding. I heard a voice from above me call out “Hey! You, there! What the hell do you want?”

  I jumped slightly, then turned to locate the speaker. He was standing at one of the small tower windows. He was too far away for me to see his features and how he might be dressed, or to get any idea of his rank.

  I shrugged to myself. What the hell. “I’m Cal Tremon, sir!” I responded in my loudest, boomiest voice. “I just disintegrated one of your supervisors and I was told in no uncertain terms to get my ass up here.”

  The man hesitated a moment, as if considering what to do. Finally he called, “Just a moment! I’ll have somebody come down and take care of you!”

  I shrugged again. I sure wasn’t going anyplace until they came, having no place to go, I wondered what was going on inside. For all I knew I was speaking to the lowest servant in the place—or to the big boss himself.

  After a few minutes the huge wooden doors creaked open a bit and a young woman emerged. She was tall and thin and had an almost aristocratic bearing about her. Years ago she’d probably been a really pretty woman, but she was now well into middle age and that usually didn’t wear well on this kind of primitive world. Her hair was white and her face more wrinkled than even her age should have permitted.

  What was important was that she was fully dressed in a long dress or robe of deep-purple silk embroidered with gold—an impressive uniform. At least a Master, I told myself, feeling even more helpless and not a little embarrassed by my appearances.

  She approached me and walked around me, examining me as if I were some prize animal stock. Her nose twitched a bit, indicating that mingling with the common stock was not altogether to her taste. She smelled of perfumes too sweet to remember the time long ago when she must have been out in the muck herself.

  Finally she straightened up, stood back, and took the overall view. I decided it was better to say nothing until she did. No use in blowing protocol. Finally she said, “So you killed Kronlon, eh?” I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Gior said you claimed to have, ah, disintegrated him or some such term?”

  I could only nod again. “That’s true. He decomposed into dust at my touch.”

  She nodded back thoughtfully, more to herself than to me. “You use those cultured words freely,” she noted, a trace of surprise in her voice. “Disintegrate. Decompose. And your speech is cultured. You are from Outside?”

  I grimaced, knowing her thoughts on my filthy appearance. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve been here some time— how long I’m not sure.”

  She put her hand to her chin in a gesture of deep thought. “What were you when you were Outside, Tremon?”

  I tried to look as innocent as possible. “I was a, ah, gentleman privateer, ma’am.” She snickered. “A pirate, you mean.”

  “For political motives,” I replied. “The Confederacy had a basic concept that I disagreed with and I took action against it.”

  “Indeed? And what concept was that?”

  “Why, this notion of equality,” I responded, still sounding as innocently insincere as I could. This was far more my game. After all this time I was back in my own element. “The Confederacy attempts to make everyone equal in all things, and to have everyone share equally in all its wealth. I believe that some people are simply more equal than others and acted accordingly.”

  She was silent for a moment; then suddenly she broke into deep, throaty laughter. “Tremon, you are amusing,” she said at last. “I do believe you will be a welcome addition to the Keep. Please come in— we’ll see about making you look and feel a bit more in keeping with your background.”

  She turned and walked inside; I followed, feeling quite a bit better. After all this time of slavery and subjugation I was beginning to feel more like myself again.

  The entry hall was alit with oil lamps of some sort, giving it a bright but flickering appearance. The place was damp and seemingly a lot chillier than anything I’d felt since arriving on Lilith. But the cold dissipated as we entered the main hall, actually something of an enclosed courtyard. It was large—perhaps forty meters square—and covered with an ornate floor made up of tens of thousands of tiny square tiles in different colors that formed a number of pleasing designs. In the center of the place was a waterfall, incredibly— not a big one, but a waterfall nonetheless. The water spurted from some fissure in the rock far above us and cascaded into a pool that frothed with the action of falling water but did not overflow, indicating an outlet or many of them. I gaped in wonder at such a thing, which was in many ways quite beautiful and impressive and, more interesting, highly creative. Whoever had designed this place really knew his stuff.

  My hostess noticed my admiring gaze. “It is nice, isn’t it?” she noted in a friendly tone. “Most impressive, really. I never quite tire of it. Under us the water is channeled into a number of different conduits, where it’s stored for fresh water, boiled for steam power and hot water, sent through the Castle for use everywhere. The excess runs off into an underground stream.” She laughed again. “All the comforts of civilization, my dear boy.” She gestured as she walked, and I continued to follow her.

  Occasionally we passed people in the stone tunnel-like corridors that fanned out from the central hall. I was conscious of a lot of side glances and outright stares from the men and women whom we passed, but nobody stopped or questioned us. Many of the people were simply dressed, often in nothing more than a simple kilt and sandals or grass skirt, occasionally topped by flowing robes of varying colors and designs. Others wore odd-looking shuts, pants, and heavy boots, indicating a variety of ranks. None, however, was naked. Simple innocence ended with the pawn world most of these people probably seldom, if ever, encountered.

  But, simple or complex in dress and rank, they all looked clean, neat, well-groomed, and, well, soft compared to the people I’d known up to now. This was civilization indeed, and I felt like a barbarian crashing a formal party.

  I was led finally to a modest room off one of the corridors; it came complete with wooden door and inside bolt. The room was certainly nothing fancy by any Outside standards, but was heaven to somebody who’d spent the past few months crammed into a communal tree hut. It was perhaps five by seven meters and contained a small table on which sat an oil lamp plus a closetlike recess with three deep drawers that rose from the floor before opening up into a reasonable hanging space. In the center stood a bed. A real bed, complete with silken sheets and fluffy-looking pillows. It had been an awfully long time since I’d seen a real bed.

  The floor was carpeted with some sort of for, possibly from the nur, the large spiderlike giants raised by one Zeis village. It felt really nice and cozy.

  “This will be your room until you complete your tests and begin training,” my hostess told me. “After testing and training well know just where you should be put.” She looked at me, and her nose twitched a bit again. “However, before you make use of it we’ll have to get that accumulated filth off you. Goodness! Don’t pawns ever bathe any more?”

  “They do,” I assured her. “But under more primitive conditions—and their work load doesn’t allow bathing on a regular basis.”

  She shrugged. “Well, you will bathe, Tremon, and tonight. Come along, I’ll set you up for it. Then I’ve got to return to the Banquet Hall. It’s not often we have a party here with so many guests, and I’m afraid you’re not as important as that to me.”

  I took her comment without insult, since I could see her point. Comparative luxury or not, life in the Castle was probably as dull as everything else about this world, so social events would be like drop to the addict for those born Outside who knew a better, more interesting life.

  She took me to the Baths, a series of small recessed pools with steaming hot water in them. Like the entry hall, the Baths were well tiled and styled by someone more artist than architect; the combination of tiny tiles and the smallest bricks I�
�d ever seen made the place classically elegant.

  Some young women of Supervisor rank, judging from their leafy skirts with little else adorning them, waited for us. My hostess quickly turned me over to them. It was one of the most unusual, though pleasant, baths I’d ever had. I’d have been somewhat embarrassed back in the civilized worlds or even on the frontier, but after months as a pawn being in a hot pool with a bevy of attractive young women was something I didn’t mind one bit.

  I was scrubbed all over by gentle, experienced hands using a frothy soap of some kind that was lightly scented; then I was given an expert rubdown and my nails clipped and trimmed, my beard and hair expertly cut and styled. If there was a more wrenching experience I’d never heard of it—from squalor to luxury in a matter of hours. I was enjoying the sensation thoroughly, feeling better and more relaxed than I’d felt since awakening aboard that prison ship. Even now, only an hour or two into this new life, those months of slave labor as a pawn seemed a distant nightmare, as if it had happened to someone else.

  The women would answer no questions and seemed as expert in turning attempts at friendly conversation into inconsequential nothings as they were in bathing and giving manicures.

  Finally I was led back to my room and left alone, the door closed behind me. I didn’t lock it; there seemed no reason. I just flopped on that great bed— the most wonderful bed ever made, I quickly decided —and let myself relax completely. As I was drifting off to sleep, somewhere in a corner of my mind Ti’s face and form seemed to peer out and look accusingly at me. I remembered no more.

  Chapter Ten

  Dr. Pohn and Master Artur

  They let me sleep late and I did. I rarely if ever remembered my dreams, but that night was beyond all experience. I am convinced that to this day it was the deepest sleep I’d ever experienced. When I finally did awaken, it was as if a signal had been given by some means. More than likely somebody had been posted in some hidden recess to watch me throughout the night. That must have been boring as hell.

  At any rate, I’d barely opened my eyes when a bell sounded somewhere far off and there was a knock on my door, which I answered with a dreamy “Enter if you will.” I had overslept to extremes and felt that I’d never really wake up.

  The door opened and a young boy, certainly no more than ten or eleven, stuck his head in. “Please remain here for a while,” he said in a pleasant, boyish tenor. “Breakfast is being brought to you.”

  I just nodded, and the door closed again. I wondered whether it was a good idea to tell them that I couldn’t go anyplace right now if my life depended on it. Every muscle ached, every part of my mind was filled with sponge and cobwebs. I had more than slept off my months of toil, I’d slept for the first time free of the constant and intangible tension and uncertainty that life had produced.

  I lay there, occupying myself as I could by trying to locate the peephole, which wasn’t difficult. In order to take in the entire room, it had to be above and probably opposite me as well. A cursory figuring of the proper angles led me to the small discolored brick niche that almost certainly had a human eye behind it.

  Breakfast arrived shortly, and I struggled up to meet it. It was a relatively simple affair, true—just some wheat toast, jellies, a few small sweetrolls, and a glass of juice—but after the gruel I’d been fed the past few months, it looked like heaven. My greatest need was the mug of hot—well, I wasn’t sure what it was, but it tasted something like mocha and was obviously a strong stimulant Everything tasted simply wonderful and did the trick.

  By the time young attendants of Supervisor rank had cleared my little portable breakfast table and taken it away, I felt ready for anything and anybody. The sight of people with the power acting as the most menial of servants fit my idea of what the Castle had to be like. From past experience in the service, I knew a general or admiral was boss, the authority figure to be feared and respected. But at Military Systems Command, for example, junior generals and admirals were only glorified messengers. Power wasn’t just what you had, it was always what you had compared to those around you.

  Still, the Supervisor class had it easy compared to the masses on Lilith. Their toil was dignified, civilized, and most of all, comfortable. Still, the youth of many of them marked them as native-born, and also reminded me that Ti, too, was somewhere here in the Castle. It would be delicate, but I had to see how she was faring and to help if I could. In a sense I owed all this to her.

  All set for my introduction into society, I hadn’t long to wait before my guide and evaluator appeared. He hadn’t knocked, a sign of extreme rank, and he was something to see. Cal Tremon was a huge man, but this chap was equally large and as well proportioned, although a lot of his body was hidden by gold-braided clothing of the- deepest black—a rather fancy shirt and tailored pants, the latter held up by a shiny, thick belt and tucked into equally shiny and impressive black boots.

  The man -himself was clean-shaven except for a thick and droopy mustache. He had a rough, experienced face, burned and etched by sun and wind. His imposing gray eyebrows set off the coldest pair of jet-black eyes I’d ever seen. His hair, carefully cut and manicured, was full and somewhat curly, the gray of it marking the type of man he was rather than his age —he might have been thirty or sixty for all anyone could tell.

  I knew in an instant this was a dangerous man, one whose fierceness and aristocratic bearing made the late, unlamented Kronlon look as threatening as Ti. I stood up and bowed slightly, feeling we might as well get off to a good start.

  “I am Master Artur,” he said, in a voice so low and thunderous that it alone would be intimidating enough to make most people jump when it sounded. Worse, I was convinced that tins was Artur’s nice, pleasant voice. I really didn’t want to see this old boy mad, at least not at me.

  “I am Keep Sergeant-at-Arms,” he continued, looking me over. I could not fathom what might be going through his brain.

  “I am Cal Tremon,” I responded, hoping that was sufficient.

  He nodded. “So you fried old Kronlon, did you? Well, good riddance to the little rat anyway. I never did like him much, although he did his job well enough. Well, enough of that. I’m to take you over to Medical and then we’ll put you through your paces. Feel up to it?”

  I nodded, although still a little hung over from my long sleep. “Now is as good a time as any,” I responded, and bowed again slightly.

  “Come along.” He gestured with his hand, and with that he turned and walked briskly out the door. I followed as best I could, noting the big man’s proud, military-style gait. He was no native of Lilith, I decided, and I wondered just who and what he had been.

  The Castle was far more alive during the day, with hordes of people all over,, many on cleanup and maintenance errands, but a lot seemingly just milling around. They all seemed so neat and clean and civilized, though, that they produced an odd set of comparisons in my mind. What these people were to the civilized worlds, ancient Greece of our ancestral world must have been to those of the early industrial revolution. Technologically primitive did not mean truly primitive at all.

  Still, the technology that was in evidence was shock enough. Since coming to Lilith I’d been conditioned to believe that such clothing and buildings and things of this nature just weren’t possible here. That’s why people slept inside bunti trees and wore nothing. Now I was beginning to appreciate the other side of the power the Warden organism could bestow—the power that was fundamental to civilized thought and society.

  The power to alter one’s environment for one’s own ends—that was the key denied to the pawns, the element that kept them in abject misery and slavery. The capricious rules of the Warden organism said that such a power was reserved to a select few.

  I did notice, though, the slight traces of fear in these people’s faces as Artur passed, the sideward glances and forced attempts not to appear to be looking at us. No doubt about it—they were terrified of him, as were the few Masters we encountered.r />
  Artur dropped me at Medical and told them where to find him when they were through. They just nodded respectfully and said as little as possible, but you could feel the relief when the big man left the room. They measured, poked, and probed as best they could, having no Outside instrumentation. They did have some clever substitutions, though, fashioned, apparently, out of things in the environment itself. A clinging sort of vine from which they appeared to be able to read my blood pressure; a small yellow leaf whose color change to red showed to experienced eyes my body temperature. All these and more were dutifully recorded with reed pens on some thin, leafy substance that served for paper.

  All of these men and women were Supervisor class, though. Only after they were through with the preliminaries and satisfied did they call in their own chief. He was a small, pudgy, middle-aged man who had the look of the civilized worlds about him without the physical standards exactingly carried through. He wore a soft white satiny robe and sandals, apparently because that was what was comfortable.

  “I am Dr. Pohn,” he began in the usual medical manner. He picked up the sheets and glanced idly at them. “I see you’re disgustingly normal. Believe it or not, just about everybody is, you know. That’s the Warden organism’s trade-off to us for living off our bodies. Damage almost anywhere except the brain itself is corrected, new limbs grown, and so forth. And the viruses here are too alien for any of us to have to worry about. Still, we go through the forms. You never know when you’re going to find someone unusual. Besides, we’re interested in comparative readings from people such as you who have demonstrated abilities with the power.”

  I nodded, remembering now that Tiel was obsessed with breeding a class with the power. This, then, would be the man in charge of the Knight’s pet project.

  “Were you a doctor—before?” I asked, both curious and trying to be friendly.