Lilith: A Snake in The Grass

by Jack L. Chalker

  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 looked 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 supercreatures 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.

  Finally, though, we were again in that eerie, funereal room with the twelve comatose girls. I saw that Ti was still among them. ‘

  “How do they eat?” I asked him. “How do you keep them from developing circulatory problems, all the troubles inherent in not moving? For that matter, how do they go to the bathroom?”

  He chuckled. “It’s a matter of routine,” he explained. “I and my assistants handle each of them at four-hour intervals. It’s quite simple. Watch.” With that he went over to the nearest unconscious girl, made a cursory examination of her, then stepped back a little.

  “Kira, sit up,” he coaxed more than ordered. The girl, still dead to the world, eyes closed and breathing regularly, sat up. It was a ghoulish sight, as if a corpse had suddenly reanimated itself without ever really coming to life.

  “Open your eyes, Kira,” he instructed, still using a gentle tone, and she did; but it was clear there was no thought behind the large, pretty brown eyes revealed there.

  “Get out of bed and stand next to it, Kira,” Pohn instructed, and again, with a smooth, fluid motion and no wasted moves, she did as she was told. I, who had killed without thinking about it more than once and had seen a lot of horrors in my life, shivered slightly.

  “She’s like a machine, an android,” I said.

  Pohn nodded. “Yes, yes, that’s pretty much it,” he agreed. “But an android is as complex as the human body. Here, with techniques like these, I will one day learn the secret of the Warden organism. With subjects like these I have already gone further than I dared hope when I started.”

  “Are they—aware—of what is happening?” I asked him.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” he assured me. “That would be far too cruel. With a lot of experimentation I have determined the location of what I. might call the key neural connectors, although that’s a layman’s simplification. Their thinking part remains as if in the deepest sleep, while the rest, their physical part, can be awakened and stimulated—I call it external motivation—to do things their conscious minds could not. Here, I’ll show you. Kira, follow me one step behind me, stopping when I stop and walking when I walk.”

  The girl followed him out the door like a shadow, and I followed them. We wound up in a small lab whose walls were the solid natural bedrock of the mountain itself, rough and unfinished. He positioned her at least three meters from one of these blank, rocky walls.

  “During that key puberty period, Kira was able to influence the growth of plants—they grew almost as you watched—and she actually made small earthquakes in her local vicinity. Then the power passed, as it does in all but a few, and I wound up with her here. Working with her, I’ve been able to discover a large number of chemical stimuli to certain areas of the brain. She supplies the power and the stimuli, I supply the willpower.” He looked around the barren room. “Do you sense the Warden organism here?”

  It had become almost second nature to sense that odd feeling of life all around, even in the most passive and inanimate of tilings. I felt it, of course, in every molecule of the rock that framed the room, and nodded to him.

  “Good. Now watch. Kira, about two meters up on the far wall I want you to hollow out a fifty-centimeter cube from the rock with your mind.” He stood back, and for some reason I shrank back as far as I could.

  I was aware that Pohn was concentrating on her, more than likely triggering those stimuli, those enzymes or whatever that built up the power.

  “Now, Kira,” he breathed.

  What happened was almost anticlimactic. No crackle of lightning, no rumblings or anything like that. It was just that … well …

  I heard a click and then a sound like falling plaster or dirt dislodged over the side of a precipice. Just a little sound—but there was now a cube of roughly fifty centimeters cut into the wall, with a heap of fine powder inside.

  Dr. Pohn went over and brushed the powder out and gestured for me to approach. I was a little nervous I about getting in the way of that kind of power, but I did examine the hollow the girl had created at Pohn’s direction. It was perfectly smooth, very regular, with no sign of how it had been formed.

  “Just proof that the potential is in all of us,” he told me. “More, I think, in women than in men for some reason. At least the women seem stronger in the powers, although more erratic. I have girls in there who could possibly reduce this castle to dust if properly stimulated and motivated.”

  “It would seem to me that the Boss and his superiors might find you something of a threat, Doctor,” I noted.

  He laughed and shook his head from side to side. “Oh, no. I’m quite strong, quite powerful, but I have no taste for knighthood. It would end my work, really., I’m no risk because they all know of my lack of ambition with regard to their jobs. In fact, they encourage my work because it might help them. Master Artur, for example, is quite interested in one of the girls, who, we think, might well be able to freeze an attacking army
, perhaps even dissolve it.”

  We walked back to the “morgue” as we talked, the zombielike Kira following obediently.

  “Which one?” I asked, feeling a little queasy.

  “That one,” he replied, pointing, as I suspected, directly at Ti.

  I was becoming pretty good at locating the secret passages. Oh, I’ll admit I didn’t try the ones they’d guard and booby-trap, the ones leading to Sir Tiel’s quarters, but the rest were more than handy. You could almost live inside the small passages and corridors in the walls, although you’d have trouble avoiding the others who used them regularly—some on business (such as spying) and some just for fun, such as voyeurism. Everybody knew about them, of course, but few really thought much about them.

  My lessons started about a week after I arrived at the Castle, and they were what I was most interested in. My tutor was Vola Tighe, sister of the elderly matron who’d admitted me in the first place. Unlike her sister, though, Vola was far more serious and businesslike and seemed to have a better idea of herself and her duties. Still, outwardly they might have been twins and may well have been.

  “The key is chemical stimuli, as you know,” she told me. “The trick is to be enough in control of yourself that you can reach inside your own head and trigger exactly what you need when you want it, then direct the result by force of will. Everyone on Lilith has this potential, but it is psychology that makes the difference. Not everyone on Lilith—not most, thank heavens—possesses the concentration, willpower, sheer intelligence to learn and execute the techniques properly.”

  “Dr. Pohn thinks otherwise,” I pointed out. “He thinks we’re born with different levels of stimuli and most of us can only do so much.”

  “That pervert,” she responded in disgust. “He was a quack even back on the frontier. He’s just a sadist with a fondness for poor little girls, and don’t you forget it. The Boss indulges him—partly because he fears him, I think, but mostly because Pohn feeds him the scientific nonsense to back up what Sir Tiel wants to hear. I think it’s- simply disgusting what he does up there to those poor little girls; it’s very much like what he got caught doing that caused him to be sent here in the first place. But as long as he restricts himself to pawns, he’s safe.”

  As long as he restricts himself to pawns … I thought back at my own condemnation of the villagers, my almost identical feelings, and really couldn’t see what was wrong with the logic. And yet somewhere there had to be a flaw, for the wrongness of this casual attitude toward the majority of Lilith’s population nagged at me. On the civilized worlds it was different, I told myself. There the majority was Homo superior, perfect in mind and body, sharing equally in the work and in the good life, the Utopian dream realized. There the inferiors were cast out to the frontier, or ferreted out and eliminated by ones like me and killed or ….

  Or sent to the Warden Diamond.

  If Vola was right and Pohn wrong, though, I told myself, it meant that the potential to turn this class-infested tyranny into a true paradise was possible, and perhaps the result most to be wished. The parallels with human history generally seemed to apply here. Those with the power had always enslaved the masses and gathered the wealth for their own ends until finally the masses rose up against the unfairness and the revolution came, casting the tyrants out. With human civilization, the enormous explosion of technology had put most manual labor into the history books and a master computer in everyone’s pocket. Control of technology had been the key to human advances; control of the Warden power here would be the equivalent. If everyone on Lilith could be taught the power, then the Dr. Pohns of this world would quickly be eradicated. I realized then that Vola didn’t understand this extension of her own logic, didn’t follow the implications to their ultimate conclusions, but I knew now what sort of cause I might devote my life to after … what?

  After I became Lord of Lilith.

  I turned back to my lessons.

  Most of the preliminaries were basic stuff, a lot of esoteric biology, a lot of Warden history, that sort of thing. Most of it I knew, and some of the mental conditioning exercises were pretty similar to those I underwent in training as an agent. It was absurdly easy —and obviously only preparatory to the real thing. What I lacked for the first few days was the key, the catalyst. I could already regulate a lot of my autonomic functions—heartbeat, respiration—and could deaden pain centers, that sort of thing. It took a little adjustment with a new body, but once you knew how, it was easy to reassume control. But these people weren’t mental marvels or miracle workers; there was an edge they had and I needed it.

  I had made such progress, though, that by the fourth day Vola decided I was ready. She entered my study cell with a small gourd brazier and ignited a fire under it. From a small skin pouch on her hip, she poured a transparent golden liquid into the gourd and allowed it to boil. The vapors alone were pretty odd and made me feel somewhat light-headed.

  Satisfied that it was right, she turned to me. “This is a drug,” she explained needlessly. “It is distilled from a somewhat poisonous plant, the hudah, found in the wild. The early science team that was stranded here started experimenting with all the wildlife, for they realized they had to understand their environment in order to live in it. This particular mixture provides the best catalyst they found for the Warden organism, causing a permanent change in you over a period of time—several dozen administrations, at least. The carefully measured dosage, given at exacting intervals, changes a key element within your cellular structure, giving a message, as it were, to the Warden organisms inside to direct a slightly different enzyme balance. Drink it down, completely if you can; if it is too hot for you, let it cool slightly. The heat simply aids absorption into your bloodstream.”

  I nodded and told her I understood. Inwardly I was elated. This was the edge, the key to real power. I drank the steaming liquid eagerly, burning my tongue slightly as I did so, but I didn’t mind. It tasted bitter and nasty, but I’d expected it to be even worse. The potion made sense, in a way. It was a natural product of Lilith, it contained Warden organisms in its own molecules, and it was the natural complement to what I’d been told about how this all worked.

  The only question I had, one not likely to find an easy answer, was how the hell anybody had ever come up with it. You could ask that about most great discoveries, though, I admit. Accident, probably.

  The stuff burned inside me, but I felt no immediate effects. I looked at Vola. “If this is truly a chemical key, then why won’t it work for everybody? Why wouldn’t it work for the pawns?”

  She smiled a little patronizingly. “It has only slight, random, and usually destructive effects on pawns. We have found that you have to have reached a state of power without its aid before it will work. Your action with the unfortunate supervisor prepared the way, made your brain willing to accept what is now being done. You see, this is the next test. Anyone not of the power will die from the poison.”

  I coughed a little and looked at her in surprise. “Now is a fine time to tell me that!”

  “Sit back and relax,” she instructed, an undertone of amusement in her voice. “Let it take control.”

  I could feel the potion start to work now, causing an odd, slightly hallucinogenic effect. The dimensions of the room seemed to be wrong, for one thing, and Vola herself, even the little brazier she was now putting away, seemed slightly fuzzy, distorted. I felt slightly flushed, as if I had a mild fever, and I realized I was sweating heavily.

  Vola came over, put her hand on my face, turning it slightly, then examined my eyes. She nodded to herself, then stepped back. “Now,” she said, her voice sounding hollow and like an echo in my ears, “let’s see how strong you really are.”

  The distorting effect seemed to pass rather quickly, to be replaced with a different sense that might be equally false. Suddenly everything seemed sharper, more detailed and focused, than I could ever remember in my life. I had been slightly sighted, it appeared, and now I could ful
ly see.

  I saw more than room and its human and inanimate contents; I also saw the Warden organism. Saw it and heard it, sort of, but in a way I’d never known before. For the first time I realized how Dr. Pohn could literally see into cells, or the-physicist into the very molecules. The whole universe seemed open to me, big and small, depending on the focus of my will, and I could see any part of it no matter how tiny. It was a heady, godlike feeling like nothing any human off Lilith could possibly imagine. And I kept thinking, this is no drug-induced hallucination, no distortion of the senses—this is for real!

  More important than sensing the Warden organism in other things, I was equally if not more aware of it within myself. The incredibly minute living things were within me, were one with me, part of me. I reached out and touched them and felt them return that mental touch, felt a sense of pleasure and excitement within those tiny creatures at the recognition of their existence. And yet the Wardens within me were also part of a larger organism, the organism that was everything on this crazy planet, all linked, all one, in communication as the cells of the body are in communication with their parts and with the cells around them.

  “Now you see how it feels,” I heard Vola’s voice as if from some distant place. “Now you know the truth of the power. Now you can use it, shape it, bend it to your will and your direction.”

  I turned and looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. Kronlon had acquired a shine, an intangible brightness you more felt than saw, when he’d mustered his limited powers against me. Vola, too, shone, but her light was so much more intense than Kronlon’s that it made him seem less than a pawn, less than a tree or blade of grass. It was not a physical shining; another observer would have seen nothing. It was instead an inner burning sensed by the tiny microorganisms within my very cells and related to me.