Lilith: A Snake in The Grass

by Jack L. Chalker

  “My name doesn’t matter, does it?” I replied carefully. “I no longer exist as him. I’m Cal Tremon now and forever; I’m just not the Cal Tremon in the court dockets. And since this is his body, I’m more of him than I’d have believed.”

  He nodded. “All right, Cal it is. But you are an agent?”

  “Assassin grade,” I answered truthfully. “But it’s not quite what you think. You and I know that, once down here and locked here forever, the only reason I’d have for killing Kreegan would be to challenge him for Lord of the Diamond. No, I’m here for something quite different.”

  “I find it interesting that they finally got that personality transfer process down mechanically. On Cerberus it’s a product of the Warden organism, as physical shape-change adaptation is to Medusa and reality perception to Charon.”

  “You knew they were working on something like that?” I prodded suspiciously.

  He nodded. “Sure. I told you I used to be a really influential power, didn’t I? A few of the people involved in the research were Catholics who were very worried about the theological implications—the soul and all that. Frankly, though, not only I but the church as a whole dismissed the entire question as impossible. See what I mean about cosmologies not fitting facts?”

  His story didn’t ring altogether true, as I knew how absolute the security had been on the process, but I had to let it stand. Maybe my only ally on Lilith was holding out on me—but I was holding out on him, too.

  “So you say it isn’t Kreegan you’re after,” he went on, changing the direction of the conversation. “Then what? What is so vital that the Confederacy is willing to sacrifice one of their best just to find out about it, and what would force you to remain true to that end once you got here?”

  Then I told him about the aliens, the penetration of the top levels of Military Systems Command, the whole story. It seemed the best course—and he might know something.

  When I finished, he just sighed, then said, “Well, now … alien enemies, huh? Using the Four Lords … Damned clever beasts, you must admit that, to understand us so well.”

  I was disappointed. If anyone other than those at the very top of the hierarchy would know about the aliens, I felt certain Bronz would. “You’ve heard nothing about this?”

  “Oh, yes, rumors,” he responded. “I didn’t put much stock in them, partly because of Kreegan. He’s not like the others. He came here voluntarily, of his own free will’, after serving the Confederacy well and loyally for his whole life. The revenge that would motivate the others would be lacking in him.”

  My heart sank. Wasted. All of it, me, wasted here. Bronz was right—it had to be one of the other Lords.

  But … did it?

  “That might be true,” I admitted, “but do you know why an otherwise sane and even superior man like Kreegan would volunteer to come to a place like this? And could such a man be kept ignorant of things as momentous as the aliens even if he weren’t directly involved at the start?”

  Bronz thought it over. “Hmm … You’re suggesting that maybe Kreegan is the kingpin? It’s possible, of course. Suppose, for example, such a man as he became thoroughly disillusioned with his job, with his employers, with the system he helped perpetuate? Suppose that somewhere in his work he stumbled over the aliens. It would explain much. It would explain, for example, how the aliens instantly knew so much about us, how they were able to use the Warden worlds to their advantage. Kreegan would be ideal for establishing, even masterminding an operation such as you described—and it would take time; He’d have to work his way up, like the rest of us. Maybe with a little alien help, of course, but it would still take time. Then, once in power, they’d start to implement their plans.”

  “I’d originally been thinking along similar lines,” I told him. “But it would mean that our aliens were supremely confident we could be counted on to overlook them for the years it would take. And they would have to have much patience.”

  Bronz shrugged. “Perhaps they do. And did you find them? How much did they learn before one of then: fancy machines finally got caught? It seems to me that, if your guess is right and these aliens are too nonhuman to do much of anything themselves, and if they knew they were well hidden or well disguised, this was the best route.”

  “The only thing wrong with such a neat picture,” I said, “is in Kreegan’s character itself. He’s a good deal older than I am, but he came from the same place. Our lives parallel to a remarkable degree, even to the type of work we did. I just can’t see what would so disillusion him about the Confederacy that he’d want to destroy it, devote his whole life to doing so.”

  “Well, now, you’ve got a point there,” Bronz came back, “but it’s not the point you think you made. I can see an awful lot to be disillusioned about in the Confederacy. I think perhaps you have Kreegan a little backward. I could just as easily picture him as a totally committed idealist willing to do anything for his cause. Out of that background I can envision a man who just might commit his very soul to such a project, not for gain but in an idealistic crusade.”

  “I think you’re crazy,” I told him. “An idealist would have certainly changed the system on Lilith. At the very least pawns would be far better off, the ruling class taken down several pegs.”

  Father Bronz laughed and shook his head in wonder. “You poor soul. Let’s look at Lilith first, in light of all I’ve said. The social system is not merely determined by individual power. It is determined by the need to have Lilith support a nonindigenous human population, something she was simply not designed to do. The-Warden organism defends the planetary ecosystem—the plant and animal balance, the rocks, the swamps, the air and water—against change. It struggles to retain an equilibrium. Total balance. We’re the aliens here, the incomprehensible ones, son. We have power, yes, but it’s of a very limited nature. We cannot reshape this planet, but can only adapt to its existing conditions. The Warden beasties won’t let us. Now, dump thirteen million totally wrong aliens here and see what happens.”

  I couldn’t see where he was going and said so.

  “It’s so simple,” he responded. “You’re so used to technology as the answer to all ills that you don’t see what we’re faced with here. All of human history is the history of technology, of using that technology so that man can change his environment to suit himself. And we have. On Earth we changed the course of rivers, we bent sun and wind and whatever it took to our ends. We leveled mountains when they were inconvenient, and built them where we wanted. We created lakes, cut down whole forests, tamed the entire planet. Then we went out to the stars and did the same thing. Terraforming. Genetic engineering. Using our technology, we changed whole planets; we even changed ourselves. Man’s history is warring with his environment and winning that war. But, son, on Lilith—and only on Lilith—man cannot declare war. He must live within the environment that was already here. On Lilith the environment won. One lonely skirmish, true, but we were whipped. Beaten. We can’t fight it. We can build a castle, yes, and get insects to carry us to and fro, but we can make only minor dents, dents that would be instantly erased if they weren’t being constantly maintained.

  “You see, son, Lilith’s the boss here, thanks to Warden’s bug. We all dance to her tune or compromise with her, but she’s the boss. And yet we must feed and house thirteen million people. We must support thirteen million alien interlopers on a land not meant for them and on which we can’t really perform more than cosmetic changes. Somebody has to grow the food and ship it. Somebody has to raise the great insect beasts and keep them domesticated. The economy must be kept going, for if those thirteen million were suddenly left entirely to their own devices they’d go out and eat and drink their fill and denude the melon groves. They’d fight each other as savage hunters and gatherers, the most primitive of tribal structures, and all but the toughest would die.

  “Don’t you see, son? Nobody enjoys the kind of hard labor it takes to keep the system going—but name me anot
her that would work. Without technology at our disposal, we are condemned to mass muscle power.”

  I was appalled. “Are you claiming that there’s no other way to do it?”

  “Nope. There are lots of other ways, all more cruel and worse than this one. There may well be a better way, but I don’t know it. I suspect that’s the way Kreegan sees it, too. I’m sure he doesn’t like the system, since it’s so much like the Confederacy—if we’re right about him, that is—but unlike the Confederacy, he, like me, can’t see any better way.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. To have all one’s basic beliefs challenged in an offhanded manner like this was a bit much. “What do you mean, this system is so much like the Confederacy?” I challenged. “I certainly can’t see any similarities.”

  Father Bronz snorted contemptuously. “Then you do not see what you see. Consider the so-called civilized worlds. Most of humanity have been equalized into a stagnant sameness beyond belief. On a given planet everybody looks pretty much the same, talks pretty much the same, eats, sleeps, works, plays pretty much the same. They’re pawns, all of them. They think the same. And they are taught that they are happy, content, at the pinnacle of human achievement, the good life for all, and they believe it. It’s true they are coddled more, their cages are gilded, but they are pawns all the same. The only real difference between their pawns and ours is that ours know that they are pawns and understand the truth of the whole system. Your civilized worlds are so perfectly programmed to think the same that they are never even allowed to face the truth.”

  “It’s a pretty comfortable pawnship,” I pointed out, not really conceding his point but allowing his terms for argument’s sake.

  “Comfortable? I suppose so. like pet canaries, maybe. Those are small birds that live in cages in people’s homes, in case you don’t know—not on the civilized worlds, of course, where pets are not thought of. But at any rate these birds are born in cages; they are fed there, and their cages are regularly cleaned by their owners. They know no other life. They know that somebody provides them with all they need to exist, and having no other expectations, they want for no more. In exchange, they chirp comfortably and provide companionship to lonely frontiersmen. Not only is no canary ever going to engineer a breakout that cage, but he’s not even going to imagine, let alone design and build, a better life. He can’t even conceive of such a thing.”

  “Those are animals,” I pointed out. “Like Sheeba here.”

  “Animals, yes,” he acknowledged, “but so are the humans of the civilized worlds. Pets. Everybody has an apartment that is just so in size, just so in furnishings, just so in every way the same. They look the same and wear the same clothes, as if it mattered, and they perform jobs designed to keep the system going. Then they return to their identical cubicles, get immersed in entertainment that involves them totally in some formula story that’s all about their own world, offering nothing-new in thought, idea, concept. Most of their free time they spend on drugs in some happy, unproductive never-never land. Their arts, their literature, their very traditions are all inherited from history. They have none of then- own. We’ve equalized them too much for that—equalized out love and ambition and creativity, too. Whenever equality is imposed as an absolute, it is always equalized at the least common denominator, and historically, the least common denominator of mankind has been quite low indeed.”

  “We still advance,” I pointed out. “We still come up with new ideas, new innovations.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Bronz admitted. “But you see, my son, that’s not from the civilized worlds. The masters of those worlds, the Outside supervisors and knights and dukes and lords, know that they can’t let progress die completely or they die and their power with it. So we have the frontier, and we have selective breeding of exceptional individuals. The elite, working in the castles of Outside.”

  “We don’t have those ranks and positions and you know it,” I retorted.

  He gave a loud guffaw. “The hell you say! And what then, pray tell, are you? What is Marek Kreegan? What, for that matter, am I? Do you know what I my real crime was, Tremon? I reintroduced not merely religion but the concepts of love, of spirituality, to those pawns. I gave them something new, a rediscovery of their humanity. And it threatened the system! I was—removed. As long as I was on the frontier giving aid and comfort to the miserable and the uncomfortable, why, I was fine. Let the churches be. But when I started making headway on the civilized worlds—oh, no, then I was dangerous. I had to be removed or I might accomplish the unthinkable. I might awaken those pawns from their total environmental entertainment mods and drug stupors and show them they didn’t have to be trained canaries any more, they could be individual human beings—like me. Like you. Like the ruling class. And I got slapped down.”

  “For a man with that idea of the civilized worlds, you are mighty complacent about this one,” I noted.

  He shrugged. “Here it is necessary—at least until somebody comes up with something better and has the power and win to enforce it and make it work. But back home—oh, no. Man is master of his environment, but he is also the slave of the technocratic class that rules so cleverly that the slaves don’t even know they’re slaves. What of complacency? Aren’t you guilty of the reverse, Cal? Aren’t you raring to change Lilith, but totally complacent about the civilized worlds? Son, the time for carrying out the orders of your superior are over. You’re calling your own tune now. You can think what you like. It provides a fascinating contrast, does it not? Here on Lilith man is enslaved in body yet free to think, to love, to dance, to tell stories, whatever. The mind is free, although the body’s in chains—just like much of human history. Back where we come from it’s not the body they own—hell, they made it—it’s the mind. Nobody’s enslaving your mind any more, boy. Use it to solve your own, not their, problems.”

  I recoiled from the dialogue. I didn’t like to think about what Bronz was saying, for if I lost my belief in my own culture and the rightness of it, I had nothing else, nothing left. Worse, if what he said was true, then what had my whole life been? Tracking down those who ‘didn’t fit, ferreting out those who would challenge, subvert, or topple the system on which th«, civilized worlds were based.

  If what he said was true, then in the context of the civilized worlds, I was …

  Kronlon.

  Could it be true? I asked myself unbelievingly. If so, did Marek Kreegan go out one day to find the enemy and come face to face with himself?

  What had Marek Kreegan been like, Vola?

  A lot like you, Col Tremon. An awful lot like you....

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sumiko O’Higgins and the Seven Covens

  A few hours after darkness on the second night we made the rendezvous point. Until now I’d left myself entirely in Father Bronx’s hands, but now I wanted information.

  “Who are these—savages?” I asked. “And what can they do for us?”

  “Cal, the savages in these parts—in fact, in most parts I’ve seen—aren’t savage, except to members of a Keep,” he told me. “They are the misfits. People with the power but untrained, people with no power but determined never to work the fields their whole lives, renegades, political outcasts like yourself, and of course their children. I picked this group because of its relative power. They are strong and highly skilled, if somewhat anarchistic.”

  “I thought you said that wouldn’t work here,” I taunted, feeling good that I’d scored at least once.

  “Oh, it doesn’t,” he responded airily. “Not on a large scale, anyway. Not even on a small one, really, but people can be made to think they’re in an anarchy if that’s what they want. On a very small scale they can be truly savages, of course—but they meet the fate of all true savages. They die young and usually violently. No, these folks have an organization and powerful people, but they are, ah, a bit unorthodox.”

  Father Bronz crossed himself when he said that last, and it was such an interesting r
eaction I had to press it. I’d seen him do that only a very few times, such as just before and just after the roadblock.

  “These people are dangerous, then?”

  He nodded. “Very. You might say that we—that is, they and I—are in the same business. Competitors.”

  “Another church?”

  He chuckled. “In a sense, yes. They are the opposition, my lad, and you don’t know how it galls me to have to use them, let alone trust them. They are witches, you see, and worship Satan.”

  I had to laugh. “Witches? Oh, come on, now.”

  “Witches,” he acknowledged gravely. “I don’t know why that should surprise you. Let’s just say you were of a magical or romantic bent. Take a look at Lilith then. A spoiled Eden. Now, instead of Warden organisms and mathematical constructs, chemical catalysts and the other stuff of science we take so much for granted, replace it with the word magic. The upper classes, those with the power, then become magicians, wizards, sorcerers. Utilizing the Warden organism as you tell me you did, on that chair for example. A thing of nature? How about a ‘magic spell’ instead? You know what runs this world, and how, and I know, but do most people? Without that knowledge, isn’t it a world of wizards and magic spells?”

  I saw his point, although it didn’t cheer me. “So we’re being placed in the hands of people who believe all this?”