Lilith: A Snake in The Grass

by Jack L. Chalker

  The Warden Diamond was, sadly, quarantined while scientists looked for a cure. Removing some of the unlucky victims in isolation chambers did not work: something linked the organisms to the Diamond, and they died when removed from the system, killing their hosts in the process, since the organisms resided in the hosts’ cells and took over, really, rearranging things to suit themselves. Without their managers, the cells rapidly went berserk, causing an ugly and painful, although mercifully swift, death.

  Oddly, those on one of the planets could still move in-system to the others, the organism having mutated so much inside them that it no longer even recognized Lilith as its home and, having struck a comfortable balance, having no further reason to change.

  Humans could live and work and build on the Warden Diamond, but once there they could never leave.

  That did not stop the scientists, of course, and they came and set up their colonies, although doing so was difficult on Lilith, where nothing not native to the planet seemed to be allowed. They came prepared and they came to study and uncover the secrets of the Warden Diamond. After two centuries their descendants were still at it, joined occasionally by others— but very little progress had been made. The planets, the organism, even the changes defied them. That only spurred them on all the more.

  But it wasn’t the scientists who were to settle the Diamond, but the antisocials. Early on, when the magnitude of the problem was realized, came the idea of setting up the four worlds as the perfect prison.

  The misfits were sent there in droves—all those whose connections could avoid the psych boys, who had genius or some sort of talent that would be destroyed by reeducation, political prisoners from countless worlds—all sent there rather than killed or mentally altered in the hope that some future successful rival would remember they didn’t kill or psych the deposed but exiled them. Male, female, it didn’t matter. The best antisocials, the political-criminal elite. And there they lived and bore their children and died, and their children lived and bore their children, and so on.

  So these worlds were run, dominated in fact, by a criminal elite imprisoned forever and with little love for or feeling of kinship with the masses of the Confederacy. Nonetheless, they had commerce. The organism could be killed, sterilized out, in a complex process, on unmanned ships. So other criminal geniuses, those not yet caught or in charge of governments, could establish caches of money, jewelry, precious art, and stolen goods of all types on the Warden worlds with no fear that the Confederacy could touch them.

  At the same time the strongest, the smartest, the most ruthless of the exiles clawed their ways to the top of these four strange worlds, until they controlled them and their own trade. Lilith, where nothing physical could be stored, was the perfect place for storing such information as special bank account numbers, official secrets even the Confederacy had to be kept ignorant of, things of that sort—the kind of information one never put into a computer because all computers are vulnerable to a genius technician. No matter how foolproof the machine, the foolproof system was devised by someone and could therefore be broken by someone else.

  So these great criminal kings—the Four Lords of the Diamond, alien now from their -ancestral race, geniuses all yet bitterly exiled nonetheless—had the secrets, the stolen goods, the blackmail of the Confederacy, and their influence extended throughout the Confederacy even though they were forever barred from seeing it.

  “Then the Four Lords are selling us out,” the young man sighed. “Why not simply destroy all four worlds? Good riddance anyway, I’d say.”

  “So would I,” Commander Krega agreed. “Only we can’t. We let them go on too long—they’re politically invulnerable. Too much wealth, too much power, too many secrets are there. There is simply no way to get them any more—they have the goods on just about anybody who would be high up enough to make those decisions.”

  The young man cleared his throat. “I see,” he responded a little disgustedly. “So why not place agents on those worlds? Find out what’s what?”

  “Oh, that was tried from the first,” Krega told him. “It didn’t work, either. Consider—we’re asking someone to exile himself permanently and allow himself to be turned, equally permanently, into something not quite human. Only a fanatic would agree to that—and fanatics make notoriously poor spies. The Four Lords are also not exactly easy marks, you know. They keep track of who’s coming in, and their own contacts here tell them just about everything they want to know about any newcomers. We might sneak one agent, one really good agent, in on them—but a lot? Never. They’d quickly catch on and just kill the lot, innocent and guilty alike. They also are supremely confident of human psychology—the agent is going to have to be damned good to get away with such an assignment. Anybody with that much on the ball is also going to realize that he is trapped there and that he’ll have to live there, on the Four Lords’ worlds, until he dies. Loyalty comes hard, but even the most loyal and committed agent is going to have the brains to see which side his future bread will be buttered on. So he switches sides. One of the current Lords is in fact a Confederacy agent.”

  “Huh?”

  Krega nodded. “Or was, I should say. Probably the best infiltrator in the business, knew all the ins and outs, and found the Diamond not threatening but fascinating. The Confederacy bored him, he said. We dropped him on Lilith just to worm his way into the hierarchy—and he sure did. In spades. Only we received almost no information from him while feeding him a great deal—and now he’s one of the enemy. See what I mean?”

  “You have a tough problem,” the young man sympathized. “You don’t have any reliable people on the Warden worlds, and anybody capable of doing what has to be done winds up on the other side. And now they’re selling us out to an alien force.”

  “Exactly.” Krega nodded. “You see where this puts us. Now, of course, we do have some people down there. None are a hundred percent reliable, and an of them would slit your throat in an instant if doing so was in their best interests. But we find occasional inducements—small payoffs of one sort or another, even a little blackmail on ones with close relatives back in the Confederacy—that give us a little edge. A little, but not much, since the Four Lords are pretty ruthless when it comes to what they perceive as treason. Our only advantage is that the worlds are still fairly new to us and so therefore relatively sparsely settled. There is no totalitarian control on any of them, and there are different systems and hierarchies on each.”

  The young man nodded. “I have the uneasy feeling that you are leading up to something—but I must remind you of what you told me about past agents, and also that, even kicking and screaming, I’d be but one man on one world.”

  Commander Krega grinned. “No, it’s not quite like that at all. You’re a damned good detective and you know it. You’ve tracked down and upset rocks in places nobody else looked at twice; outmaneuvered and outguessed sophisticated computers and some of the best criminal minds ever known, even though you are still quite young. You are the youngest person with the rank of Inspector in the history of the Confederacy. We have two different problems here. One, we must identify this alien force and ‘trace it back to its origin. We must find out who they are and where they are and what their intentions are. Even now it may be too late, but we must act as if it were not. Two, we must neutralize their information conduit, the Four Lords. How would you do it?”

  The young man smiled thoughtfully. “Pay the Four Lords more than the aliens do,” he suggested hopefully. “Put ‘em to work for us.”

  “Impossible. We already thought of that,” the commander responded glumly. “It’s not profit—they have more than they need. And it’s not power—that, too, they have in abundance. But we have cut them off forever from the rest of the universe, trapped them there. Before, they could do nothing—but now, with an alien force as their ally, they can. I’m afraid such people are motivated by revenge, and that we cannot give them. We can’t even commute their sentence, short of a scientific br
eakthrough—and nobody has more people working on that angle than they do. No, making a deal is out. We have no cards.”

  “Then you need somebody good down there on each world, looking for clues to the aliens. There has to be some sort of direct contact: they have to get their information out and their little play-toys, like that fancy robot, programmed and in. An agent might turn traitor, but if he was a volunteer he wouldn’t be motivated by revenge and would sure as hell feel closer to humanity than to some aliens of unknown appearance and design.”

  “Agreed. And it would have to be the very best for all four. Someone who could survive, even prosper under their conditions while having the ability to collect enough data and get it out. But how do we buy the time we also need?”

  The young man grinned. “Easy. At least easy to say—maybe nearly impossible to do. You kill all four Lords. Others would take their places, of course, but in the interim you’d buy months, maybe years.”

  “That was our thinking,” Krega agreed. “And so we ran it through the computers. Master detective, loyal, willing to volunteer, and with an Assassin’s License. Four needed, plus a coordinator, since they all would have to be put to work simultaneously and would obviously have no likely reason or means to ‘contact one another. Plus for insurance, of course, spares that could be sent in if something happened to one or more of the originals. We fed in all these attributes and requirements and out you popped.”

  The young man chuckled dryly. “I’ll bet Me and who else?”

  “Nobody else. Just you.”

  For the first time the man looked puzzled. He frowned. “Just me?”

  “Oh, lots of secondaries, but they were slightly less reliable for one reason or another, or slightly weaker in one or another way, or, frankly, were engaged on other vital business or located halfway around the Confederacy.”

  “Then you’ve got two problems,” the young man told Krega. “First, you have to figure out how the hell I’d volunteer willingly for an assignment like this, and, second, how you’re going to make …” His voice trailed off and he suddenly sat up straight. “I think I see …”

  “I thought you would.” Krega sounded satisfied and confident. “It’s probably the most guarded secret in the Confederacy, but the Merton Process works now. Almost a hundred percent.”

  The other nodded absently, thinking about it. When he’d received his promotion to Inspector over a year ago, they’d taken him into an elaborate and somewhat mystifying laboratory and put him into some sort of hypnotic state. He was never quite sure what they had done, but he’d had a headache for three days and that had aroused his curiosity. The Merton Process. The key to immortality, some said. It had taken a hell of a lot of spare-time detective work to come even that close to it, and all he’d been able to determine in the end was that the Confederacy was working on a process wherein the entire memory, the entire personality, of an individual could be taken, stored in some way, and then imprinted on another brain, perhaps a clone brain. He had also learned that every time it had been tried, the new body either had become hopelessly insane or had died. He said as much.

  “That used to be the case,” Krega agreed, “but no more. The clone brains just couldn’t take it. Raised in tanks, they had developed different brain patterns for the autonomic functions, and those were always disrupted in the transfer. Still, we had been able to remove all the conscious part of the brain from someone and then put it back just the way it was in the original body while also keeping the original information on file. That led, of course, to trying it with other bodies —remove the cerebral part, as it were, just like erasing a recording, then put someone else’s personality and memories in there. It’s a ticklish business—only works once in a while, when loads of factors I don’t understand very well, and maybe Merton doesn’t either, match. The new body has to be at least two years younger than the original, for example. On the other hand, some important factors like sex or planetary origin seem to be irrelevant. Still, we get a perfect transfer about one in twenty times.”

  He stirred uneasily. “What happens to the other nineteen?”

  Krega shrugged. “They die, or are nuts and have to be destroyed. We use only minor antisocials anyway, those who would have to be psyched and programmed or simply eliminated. We took your print fourteen months ago—you must know that. Now we can make four of you. Different bodies, of course, but you inside in every single detail. More than four, if necessary. We can drop you on all four planets simultaneously, complete with criminal record and past history. We can drop you on all four and still keep you here, as you are, to correlate the data from the others.”

  The young man said nothing for almost a minute, then: “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Four times damned, yet also not damned at all,” the commander came back. “So you see, there’s no risk. We already have your imprint.”

  He considered the facts. “Still, there’d have to be a more recent one,” he noted. “It wouldn’t do to have four of me wake up en route to the Warden Diamond in different bodies with no knowledge of the last fourteen months, not to mention this conversation.”

  Krega nodded. “You’re right, of course. But I have mine updated annually, anyway. Except for the headache, if the process worked the first time it’ll work ever after.”

  “That’s reassuring,” the man replied uncomfortably, considering that they had done it to him without his knowledge before—and the commander’s words implied that sometimes it didn’t work. Dismissing that idea from his mind, he asked, “But how do I get the data to correlate? Even supposing that these four versions of me are able to ferret out everything you want to know—how do I know it?”

  Krega reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a small box. He opened it gingerly and pushed it over to the young man. “With this,” he said flatly.

  The man looked at the object. “This” turned out to be a tiny little bead of unknown substance so small it could hardly be seen with the naked eye even in its black velveteen setting.

  “A tracer implant?” The young man was skeptical. “What good does that do us?” The device was familiar to all cops; it could be implanted anywhere on a body with no chance of detection and with no operation necessary. Once in place, someone could follow its signal to just about anywhere—a common police tool.

  “Not a tracer,” the commander told him. “Based on it, 111 admit, but more a by-product of the Merton researches. It is implanted directly into a specific point in the brain—I’m sorry I don’t have enough technical biology to explain further. You’ll get one, too. It only works when two bodies have exactly the same brain pattern; otherwise you get gibberish. Using the tracer part, a special receiver can locate the wearer anywhere on a planet, then lock onto him, receive, and enormously amplify what it receives, which then is fed to a Merton recorder. From that another imprint can be made, a ‘soft’ one, that win give its matched mate a record of just what happened after the new body awoke until we took the readout It’s soft—they tell me the sensation is kind of like! seeing a movie all at once. But it’s a record of everything your counterpart said and did. We’ll put you on a guard picket ship, very comfortable, and take almost continuous soft imprints using monitor satellites. You’ll have your information, all right. And the thing’s actually a quasi-organic substance, so even on Lilith, which hates everything alien, it will continue to function as part of the body. We know. We have a couple of people with tracers down there now—they don’t know it, of course. Just a test. Works fine.”

  The young man nodded. “You seem to have thought of everything.” He paused a moment. “And what if I refuse after all this? Or to put it another way, what if I say to go ahead and my, ah, alter egos decide once down there not to cooperate?”

  Krega grinned evilly. “Consider what I’m offering. We have the capacity to make you immortal—if you succeed. If you succeed, no reward would be high enough. You are an atheist. You know that when you go, you go forever—unless you succeed. Th
en you, and because of the soft imprints, your alter egos as well will continue to exist. Continue to live on. I think that is quite an inducement.”

  The young man looked thoughtful. “I wonder if they will see it that way?” he mused, only half aloud.

  Four Lords of the Diamond, pour enormously powerful, clever people to kill. Four keys to an enigma that could spell the end of humanity. Five problems, five puzzles.

  Krega didn’t really have to offer a reward. The assignment was irresistible.

  3

  The base ship was seven kilometers long. It floated there off the Warden system, about a quarter of a light-year from the sun. Designed as a floating base, almost a mini-world, the ship was completely self-contained, and were it not for the feeling of isolation all around, a pretty comfortable duty.

  From its lower decks sped the picket ships: one-man or often totally automated vessels that encircled the Warden system and kept the base ship in constant touch with every section of space around and inside the solar system itself. All commerce had to come here first, then be transferred to automated craft for an in-system run. No one but the military was allowed beyond the perimeter the picket ships established, and even military personnel never landed. The penalty for any violation was simple—capture if possible, elimination if not possible. Between the automatic guardians and the manned patrols a violator might get by one or two, but he would have to run a gauntlet of several hundred to get anywhere meaningful—and do so against the best defensive computers known.

  For this reason, the pinpointing of the Warden Diamond as the center of some alien conspiracy was met with a great deal of skepticism by the organized military forces, most of which believed that the alien robot -had simply practiced misdirection in desperation after being discovered.