Lilith: A Snake in the Grass flotd-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  I had no choice but to approach him, although my nervousness must have showed.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “I don’t bite, nor do I inflict pain on pawns or eat little babies for breakfast.” He looked me over in the torchlight, and his eyes widened slightly. “Why, you must be Cal Tremon!”

  I betrayed no outward emotion, but inwardly I tensed. I had a bad feeling about that recognition.

  “I’ve heard much about you from, ah, other colleagues of yours who wound up here,” he continued. “I was wondering what you looked like.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all. It implied that a fair number of people around might know more about Cal Tremon’s life and exploits than I did.

  “Have a seat,” he gestured at a small tuft of grass, “and for heaven’s sake, relax! I am a man of God—you have nothing to fear from me.”

  I sat, thinking just how wrong he was. It wasn’t his power I feared, but his knowledge that could expose me. Despite my misgivings, I loosened up a little and decided to talk to him. “I’m Tremon,” I admitted. “What sort of stuff have you heard about me? And from whom?”

  He smiled. “Well, all of the newer folk were to one degree or another in your former line of work. Reputations carry, you know, among people of like trades. You’re a legend, Cal—I hope I may call you Cal. That Coristan raid alone guaranteed that. Single-handedly blowing the domes of the entire mining colony and making off with forty millions in jondite!” He shook his head in wonder. “With that kind of talent and those brains—not to mention money—I wonder they ever caught you.”

  ’They put a Security assassin on my trail,” I responded as glibly as I could, having never heard of Coristan and not having the slightest idea what jondite was or what it was used for. “They’re the best at what they do and they rarely fail. The only reason I wasn’t killed outright was that I’d had the foresight to stash the loot and have it wiped, so they needed me alive to get the key information and find it.” That much was the truth; the briefing had been better on the latter-day career and psycho-profile.

  The cleric nodded sagely. “Yes, the agents are almost impossible to avoid—and even if you get one, the rest are on you. You know the reigning Lord of Lilith was an agent?”

  I nodded. “So I heard. Excuse me for saying so, but it’s pretty odd to find a cleric out here, and particularly strange to find one who talks to thieves and murderers so matter-of-factly.’’

  Father Bronz laughed. “No preaching, you mean? Well, I have my work and it’s a little different. I was a preacher once, and a good one—the victim of my own success, I fear. Started with a tiny little church—perhaps twenty, thirty members—on a small frontier world, and it just grew until I was the dominant cleric of three worlds, two of them civilized!” His face turned a little vacant, his eyes slightly glassy. “Ah! The enormous sums pouring into the coffers, the cathedrals, the mass worship and blessing for a half million at a time! It was grand!” He sounded both nostalgic and wistful.

  “What happened to bring you here, then?” I asked him.

  He returned to the present and looked at me squarely. “I gained too much. Too many worshipers, too much money, which of course meant too much power. The church was uncomfortable; they passed me over for archbishop and kept sending in stupid little men to take charge. Then the congress and powers that be on a number of worlds we were just starting on got nervous, too, and started putting pressure on the church. They couldn’t do anything, though—I’d broken no laws. They couldn’t just demote me. I’d just pop up elsewhere, and my following and my order would have exerted their influence to return me. That would have been an unforgivable defeat, so they had the idea of posting me to missionary work in the Warden Diamond—the perfect exile, you might say. But I wouldn’t go. I threatened to take my order and my following out of the church and form our own denomination. It’s been done before when the church has become corrupt. Of course that’s where they got me. They played a few computer games, got some trumped-up charges about misappropriation of funds and using religion for political influence, and here I am—exiled to the post I wouldn’t go to voluntarily, transported like any common criminal.”

  I had the idea that nothing about Father Bronz was common. “And yet you still serve the church as a missionary here?” I asked incredulously.

  He smiled. “My bookkeeping may have been lousy, but my motives were sincere. I believe in the religious part of my church’s teachings, and I believe God uses me as His instrument in His work. The civilized church is as secular and corrupt as the governments—but not here. On Lilith it’s back to basics—no ranks, no churches, just pure faith. Here I am with a large heathen population and no superior save God Almighty.” He looked around at the pawns going about their evening routines and lowered his voice a bit.

  “Look at them,” he almost whispered. “What kind of life is this you are all leading? There’s no hope here, no future, just a stagnant present. If you don’t have the power you’re a pawn in the literal sense of that term. But they’re human beings all the same. They need hope, a promise of something better, something beyond this life. They’ll not get it on Lilith, and they can’t leave the place, so Eternity is there only hope of salvation. As for some—the criminal element, let’s say—well, that’s where people like me are needed most. Besides,” he added, “they need me. Who else will hear their complaints, as pitifully small as they really are, and who else will speak for them with authority to there superiors? Just people like me. No more.”

  I had his number now, I thought. He was completely insane, of course, but in his tremendous guilt over his own criminality with his cult or whatever, he’d decided on reparation for that guilt. The martyr type. Save his own soul through saving others. Such men were dangerous, since they were far too fanatical to face reality, but they were useful, too. Useful in some way to these people, and perhaps a lot more useful to me.

  Father Bronz looked over and saw Ti standing shyly nearby. He sighed sadly. “Oh, no,” he murmured under his bream but I caught it.

  My eyebrows rose in surprise. “What’s the matter?”

  He gestured at Ti. “It’s a sin, what they’re doing with her and with a lot of other fine girls. They’re coming along too quick—and their fates once they’re taken into the castles are even worse.”

  I felt a nervous tingling. I didn’t like to think of that, and by common consent, the subject was never mentioned. Perhaps I didn’t want to think of her leaving, at least not while I was here. She had helped pull me out of the black pit into which my mind had sunk and had provided me with a friend, a companion, a source of information and growth. We’d already been paired longer than anyone in the village could remember anyone else being. Though I didn’t kid myself that it was more than my body and her body having stronger needs that only we two could fulfill, I still didn’t like to think of the future. But I felt compelled to ask the questions.

  “What will they do to her?” I found myself asking in spite of myself.

  He sighed sadly again. “First they’ll freeze her, so to speak,” Father Bronze said slowly. “A growing, intelligent mind would be a liability to them, so they’ll keep her in a state of perpetual childhood. Even worse than now. It’s only a matter of finding the right part of the brain and carefully killing what’s necessary. Most of the bodymasters are former physicians and can do it easily. Then they heighten the glandular secretions or whatever—I’m no doctor, I don’t really know—and when everything’s balanced, they’ll stick her in a harem with similarly treated girls and experiment with baby after baby trying to find the key to the power and how to transmit it. It’s almost a mania with the knights, and the bodymasters are happy to practice, to continue to experiment, in their chosen field.”

  I shivered slightly. “And they’re doctors? I thought doctors saved lives and made bodies and minds whole.”

  He looked at me strangely. “What an odd sort you are, Tremon! Why, of course doctors are no more fre
e from sin and corruption than you or I. There are good ones and bad ones, and most of the highly skilled bad ones wind up here, the better to test their grotesque theories. I’ve heard it said that the Confederacy encourages them in this, even provides off world computer analysis of their work, in the hope they’ll find out what makes the Warden organism tick.”

  I just shook my head, refusing to accept such a horrible thought. The Confederacy! It was crazy, insane, and perfectly logical, damn it. All other experiments had come to nothing, after all, and these were considered prison worlds. But Confederacy support or no, what Bronz was saying was bleak news indeed for poor Ti.

  “How long before they—take her?” I asked, fearing the answer.

  He looked carefully at her. “Well,” he replied, “she’s already had all the preliminary treatments. I’d say she would be overdue. You see, they can’t let her go too long or shell have to set an intellectual pattern for them to play with safely. In other words, she’d be too smart for them, too complicated. I suspect that you’ve accelerated their plans, if they’re aware of the attachment you two have formed, since contact with an outsider like you would widen her world.”

  I started, not only because I might have speeded up this dread fate but also because Bronz had so easily noted that Ti and I had been having a relationship. “How’d you know about us?” I wanted to know.

  He laughed. “A priest is many things, but an observer of human nature is one of the most important I see the way she hovers there, the way she looks at you, like some eager puppy for her master. She’s really smitten with you, whether you realize it or not What are your feelings toward her?

  I thought about it. Just what were my feelings about Ti? I really wasn’t quite sure myself. By no stretch of the imagination did I consider us mates, having any obligations for one another. I’d never found that sort of arrangement comprehensible anyway. But I did feel a great fondness for her, not only physically but because she had the potential of becoming a complete human being. She was bright and curious, and she picked up new concepts much more quickly than any of the other native-born of this crazy world. I wondered vaguely whether it was possible to feel paternal and lustful at the same time. That smacked of some sort of nicest, even though we weren’t in any way related, yet it summed up my feelings as much as anything, so I told Bronz as much.

  He nodded. “I thought it might be something like that. Too bad, too, because with you she might have grown to be a hell of a woman.”

  I considered what he was saying. Potential, that was the word. Potential. That was what I’d found so attractive in her, in contrast to the milling pawns around. Yet it was her tragedy, too. I felt a sudden strong fury rising in me, which I couldn’t quite understand or fully control. That potential was what they were going to take from her. So great a wave of anger swept through me that I almost trembled with raw, brutal emotion, and I had trouble controlling it.

  Father Bronz just sat and watched me, a serious expression on his face. Finally, as I gained some control over myself and tried to relax, to beat down the alien emotional tide, he spoke.

  “For the first time,” he said softly, “I saw the real Cal Tremon there beside me; he was a frightening figure, fully as terrible as his legends. I felt it, too. Great power welling up inside, bubbling like molten rock almost to the surface. You are going to be a powerful man indeed one day, Tremon, if you learn how to channel and use that fury.”

  I just sat and stared strangely at him, a sudden awareness of myself and my own potential exploding in my mind. In that instant I knew Bronz, from the standpoint of a very powerful Master, had felt a surge in my Warden abilities. Now I understood why some would rise and some would not, and how it was done. The key was emotion—raw, terrible emotion. Up until that moment I had never suffered much from emotion, a weakness I could not afford in my old work as an agent. Here, though, the enzymes and hormones and all the rest that had made Tremon such a terror had come to the fore, almost consumed me. Bronz had felt it.

  It wasn’t just how much power you had, it was how much self-control went along with that power—the ability to take raw, unbridled emotion and channel it, control it, shape it with your intellect. That, possibly more than any gradations of power, was what separated the ranks on this world. That explained why Kronlon, with all his power, was such a little man and would always be. That also explained why Marek Kreegan had risen to become Lord. He had been a trained agent, at the absolute top of his profession, here, in this sort of situation.

  It was growing late; most of the other pawns had already returned to their huts and were sleeping now. I was, for now, still a pawn, facing the usual long day of work. “Will you still be here tomorrow?” I asked Bronz.

  He shook his head. “No, sorry. I have a long way to go and I’ve tarried too long here now. I’m due in Shemlon Keep, to the south of here. Still, it was good meeting you, and I’ve a premonition of sorts we’ll meet again. A man of your power will rise quickly on this world, if properly trained and developed.”

  That remark was too important to pass up. “Trained,” I repeated. “By whom? Who does the training?”

  “Sometimes nobody, sometimes somebody who knows somebody,” he replied enigmatically. “The best training, I have heard, is from the colony descended from the first scientists to -visit this world, Moab Keep, but that’s thousands of kilometers from here. Don’t worry, you’ll find somebody—the best always do.”

  I left him still sitting there and accompanied Ti to the hut. Even though the hour was late and it had been a long day I had difficulty getting to sleep. Thoughts of breaking free of this pawn life, with eventually finding and facing down Marek Kreegan filled my head. And I also thought of Ti, poor, naive little Ti and what they were doing to her. I had built up a whole army I wanted to get even with, many of whom I hadn’t even met as yet.

  Chapter Eight

  Social Mobility on Lilith

  I continued to practice as much as I could while continuing my menial labors. If nothing else, I told myself, these past weeks or months or however long it’d been had accomplished two things. One was to tone up and fine-tune Cal Tremon’s body so that it felt not only totally natural but really mine. Furthermore, its —no, my—muscles developed to a degree I’d have thought impossible not so long ago. I was hefting three or more times my considerable weight without even thinking about it, the aches long gone. I had no doubt that I could easily bend solid steel bars.

  But, oddly, it was the second thing that I, as a trained agent, appreciated the most. I had been humbled. I had been bent, then broken, with almost ridiculous ease, and the process had been humiliating.

  Now, this might be a curious thing to say, but I badly needed to be humbled. I had been cocky, eager, too sure of myself when this escapade had started. Homo superior—never beaten in an assignment. I still believed that, but the place I was superior was now forever closed to me. This was a totally alien world, a world that operated on very different rules. I was out of my element here; so if I was going to win, I had to be brought down hard in order to build up again, almost from scratch. This fact, Fm sure, was the only reason I was still alive at this point. That and the fact that, though broken in the face of seemingly unassailable power, I had lost my sense of purpose but never my will to survive.

  At the end of a day shortly after Bronz’s departure, I walked back to the village for the evening meal with the others. I was already well into the food when I turned and looked at the faces of the others, the dirty and tired pawns of the village, and realized that something was not quite right.

  Ti wasn’t there. We almost always met here and ate together, and the composition of the Keep was so regular and unvarying that the few times when she’d had to be elsewhere I had always known in advance.

  I started asking around, but no one had seen her. Finally I sought out some of the people she worked with at the nursery and they only said that Kronlon had come for her around the midday meal and she had gone off with
him.

  I frowned. Although Kronlon wasn’t above taking those he was attracted to for a little fun, this was the wrong time. Kronlon, for all his power in relation to us, was just a shade higher on the scale than we pawns, and he had his own duties to perform. I had a really bad feeling about this. I stopped eating, stood up, and walked slowly through the crowd of pawns toward the supervisor’s area. This wasn’t an act rational people performed, but I wasn’t about to let this go.

  Kronlon was in. I could see him off in his little cubby-hole drinking something—probably local beer—out of a large gourd and puffing on what could have been anything from a stinkweed cigar to happy smoke. Pawns didn’t get those luxuries, so I really couldn’t be certain. Since it was so unusual for anyone to approach his quarters voluntarily, he noticed the movement out of the corner of his eye and turned in surprise. When he saw who it was, his face broke into an evil grin.

  “Tremon! Well, well! I kinda expected you tonight!” he called out. “Come on in, boy!”

  I approached, a little cautious, since even though I could sense, feel, hear, see the Warden organism in just about everything, including him, I hadn’t had any success in actually making use of that sense. Kronlon, it seemed to me, burned a little more brightly than others whom I’d concentrated on—or was that just nerves? You never forgot the feeling he gave you, the incredible agony he could inflict merely by willing it. I had the fleeting impulse to back out, but it was too late and I knew it. He’d seen me, he’d invited me over—and that was a command. No matter what, I was stuck.

  Kronlon sat back and eyed me with an amused smirk. “Lookin’ for your little bitch, huh? Missin’ your bed partner?” His eyes flashed with cruel amusement. I knew he was baiting me, the son of a bitch.

  I felt a warm, uncharacteristic rush of anger rising within me, but it was partially cancelled out by my fear of him. I just nodded and stayed silent.