Lilith: A Snake in The Grass

by Jack L. Chalker

  “You mean the big people don’t have sex?” I asked incredulously.

  “Haw. Sure. When you got the power it’s easy,” Hogi responded. “You get cut, you just tell your body not to bleed. You also just tell your body not to get pregnant. See?” This was all said in the boy-are-you-dumb tone he usually used when talking to me.

  It all fit, though. They were breeding with the strong wild talents that occasionally cropped up among the pawns’ children. Trying for power and control—and perhaps the key to breeding power in their own young.

  But this young gal had the power, even if it was wild, and that was the most important thing to me. I had to know a lot more about that power, and since she was the only one around who had it that I could talk to as an equal, I determined to get to know her.

  Chapter Six

  Ti

  The next evening, I sought her out, trying to appear as casual as I could. I had been warned that she was hard to approach and difficult to talk to, but I had no problems. Sitting on a rock off by herself and out of the torchlights, she was fanning away the ever-present swarms of tiny bugs and idly chewing on a piece of gri, a melonlike fruit with an odd sweet-and-sour taste.

  There wasn’t really too much I could do without being either corny or obvious, so I just walked up close to her and said, “Hello, there.”

  She looked up with those huge, little girl’s eyes and smiled. “Hi. Sure. Have a seat.”

  “My name is—” I began, but she cut me off. “Your name’s Caltremon, and you come from Outside,” she shot, catching me a little off-guard. Her voice, still a youthful one, more matched her face and true age than her body.

  I laughed. “And how do you know all that?”

  “I seen you lookin’ at me,” she responded playfully. “O’course, all the men look at me, but I ‘specially noticed you. They say you’s sick in the head. That right?”

  I found myself instantly warming to her. “I was,” I told her, “but I’m better now. This is not like the place I came from, and it took a lot of getting used to.”

  She tossed the rind back into the bushes and shifted around, pulling her knees up against her bosom and putting her arms around her legs, rocking slightly. “What’s it like—Outside, I mean?” she wanted to know.

  I smiled. She was so damned cute. “Nothing like here,” I replied, trying to find terms she could understand. “Not at all. For one thing, it’s cooler. And there aren’t any pawns or supers or knights.”

  I could see that this was hard for her to digest. “If there ain’t no pawns, who does the work?”

  A fair question. “People who want to do it,” I tried carefully. “And it’s a different kind of work than we do “here. Machines do all the really heavy stuff.”

  “I heard ‘bout ‘sheens,” she said knowingly. “But somebody gotta raise ‘em and breed ‘em, right?”

  I sighed. The usual dead end. How could you explain machines to somebody who was born and raised on a world where nothing worked and practically nothing lasted? I decided this could be used as a back way into the subject that really interested me.

  “Where I come from nobody has the power,” I told her. “And when a place doesn’t have the power, you can change things, make things that last. Some of those are machines, and they do what the power does here.”

  She mulled this over, trying to sort it out, but didn’t seem to understand. That was about as far as I’d gotten with anybody else, though, which indicated she had some brains.

  “Why don’t they have the power?” she asked. I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know why some people do. I don’t really understand what the power is even now.” Watch it, I warned myself. Be very careful. “I hear you got the power. Is that right?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so,” she admitted. “Don’t do me no good, though. Y’know, like you can feel it inside but can’t talk to it. I guess that’s what them others can do. They can talk to it, tell it to do things.”

  “But you can feel it,” I prompted. “What’s it feel like?”

  She unclasped her arms and slid down from the rock, stretching and rubbing her behind. She slithered over and sat right next to me. “I just can feel it, that’s all,” she replied. “Can’t you?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. Either I don’t have it or I don’t know how to look or what to feel.”

  She shrugged. “Ever look?”

  I considered that, and filed it for reference.

  I tried to press the subject, but she’d become bored with it and didn’t want to talk about it any more. I decided not to push her. I’d made an easy friend here, and I didn’t want to blow my advantage all at once. There would be other nights.

  I was suddenly aware that she was sitting very close to me, and for the first time I realized why she was attracted to me and had noticed me before. My most outstanding outsized feature would be an almost irresistible magnet to somebody being manipulated as she was. And for the first time in this body, I did start feeling the urge, but something stopped me. She was so very young, damn it all, and for her the word “pawn” took on an even greater meaning.

  After a little small talk elicited no response from me she sat up and looked at me strangely. “You ain’t one of them man-lovers, are you?” she asked, genuinely perplexed.

  I had to laugh. “No, not that,” I replied carefully. “I—well, it’s just that, where I come from, somebody my age feels funny with somebody your age.” I could have a child your age, I added to myself.

  She gave me a disgusted look. “That’s what I thought,” she pouted. “I dunno why that’s a big deal. It ain’t like I never done it, you know. I do it lots since I come out. Master Tang said it was good to do it.” She stood up, looking miffed. “Guess I’ll go up to the Super, then. He don’t mind.”

  I sighed. This combination of child-woman was hard for me to accept, let alone cope with. I was also torn by my desire not to alienate her and my mental reaction to her as a child. How can I explain it? It was as if an adolescent who was very desirable had said, “If you don’t make love to me I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue, so there!” The contrast between willing and sensuous woman and small child was just something I couldn’t figure out how to handle, particularly when I knew that her avid sexuality was induced by cold, uncaring men who saw her as an animal, some land of domesticated beast. It seemed, damn it, somewhat incestuous to take advantage of that sort of situation.

  I’d like to think that the reason I gave in that night had to do with my fear of alienating her and thus jeopardizing my only avenue of gaining knowledge.

  The body Security had given me was, of course, a body of opportunity. Krega had said that they went through a lot of bodies before an imprint “took,” so it was pure chance that I wound up with this one—yet it proved to be my real break. Its primitive, throw-back nature gave me size and great strength, and its oversexed development had attracted Ti. In the days that followed she stayed with me and near me, at least in the evenings. On size alone I seem to have made, in her mind at least, the other men around seem inadequate. Furthermore, a playboy learns just about every variation, and variety wasn’t well known on Lilith.

  I kept after her, subtly and without boring her, about this power she felt and its nature. Slowly, considering her fairly short attention span, I got what I could. Late at night, with Ti lying at my side, I tried to shut out everything and everybody else and see if I, too, could “feel it.”

  It was an internal process, somewhat a mental process, but there was no real guide to it. Ti had been born with the power, had grown up with it, and therefore wasn’t the best person to tell me exactly what to look for. The best would have been a super or higher, and they weren’t going to reveal anything.

  Kronlon was the key to my persistence. The man was a sadist, a petty little godlet without the brains he was born with. Yet somehow he’d found it, learned to use it. I will never understand the selection process for Warden worlds, I’m convinced, if a Kronlon
could have been sent here instead of wiped. And sent here he’d been—or so Ti assured me. A long time ago now, of course, but that bastard had been spawned in my space, not here on this primitive and brutal planet.

  What had he done to awaken those powers? I wondered each night. What did he feel?

  Sometimes, on the border of sleep, I thought I could feel something stirring, something strange; but it was elusive, beyond my grasp. I was beginning to worry that it was denied me. Or perhaps the fact that this was not my body was the blocking factor. It was said to be a sense of alienness. To my mind, anyway, this body I wore, former property of the late and un-lamented Cal Tremon, was alien, too—though becoming less and less so. I was not really aware of it at the time, but now, looking back, I can see more clearly.

  My memories and personality were intact, but there is a biological side to us as well, one involving enzymes, hormones, and secretions. It is as if the individual, the personality, is a particularly vivid black-and-white photograph and those physiological elements add the color, the shading, the nuance. Even your sexual preferences are determined mostly by a small cluster of cells deep in the cerebrum. Such cells aren’t transferred in the process with the personality; you inherit the body you get with all its physiological and chemical properties, and they change you.

  Tremon’s body was particularly sensitive to that sort of thing, since it was an unregulated one from the frontier. On the civilized worlds such physical and chemical properties are carefully regulated. But Tremon, the result of a random coupling of two unregulated people, was subject to all the ancient genes and the variations spawned not only by evolution but also by mutation, something spacers were particularly prone to.

  Personality is built on these properties, not the other way around. Tremon was violent, aggressive, and amoral; he simply couldn’t be more of the brutish male, with all that implies than he was. All these physical factors now worked on me as they had on him, and were tempered only by my own memories and personality, my old ingrained habits and cultural inhibitions. Tempered, but not damped out. Of course the longer I remained in the body, the more completely these factors would come to dominate my behavior. Already I was beginning to look back on my old life and existence with more than a little wonder, trying in vain to understand how I could have acted this way or that, or done this or that, or enjoyed this rather than that. It was becoming more and more difficult to think of that old life as my own. Terribly clear and vivid and the only past I had, but increasingly I began thinking and acting as if I, Cal Tremon, had somehow inherited from Security the memories and knowledge of a total stranger.

  Within a couple of weeks of first meeting Ti, I found it difficult to understand my earlier reluctance about her. I understood on an intellectual level, of course, but on the increasingly dominant emotional level it became harder and harder to believe that those objections mattered.

  Then one evening, on my way back to the village after a long, tiring day, looking forward to food and Ti, I heard the grass talking.

  It was an eerie, alien sensation like nothing I’d ever experienced before; it wasn’t any kind of conversation we humans could comprehend. It was as if somehow the grass was suddenly filled with colonies of living things in contact with one another, even between blades and clusters of grass. I was aware of a discomforting protest when I trod down some of the grass, and of a tiny tickle of relief when I moved on. I don’t think it was intelligence I was sensing, but it was awareness, life of some sort, on a very basic, emotive level. And yet it was communication of a sort. For after a bit of walking I could sense a distant feeling of tension just ahead in the grass that I was about to step on.

  It was a strange sensation, there and yet almost not there, sensed mostly because it was so pervasive, because there was just so damned much grass. The feeling excited me, even though I had to face the fact that I was tired, dirty, somewhat depressed, and just possibly was going nuts.

  Ti, however, who joined me from her job at the nursery, seemed to sense something even before I told her about it. “You felt it today,” she said, not asked.

  I nodded. “I think so. It was—odd. Hearing the grass, sensing countless billions of tiny interconnected living things.”

  She didn’t follow some of the big words but she knew what I meant and I saw an unexpected look of pity on her face. “You mean,” she asked incredulously, “you couldn’t hear it ‘fore now?”

  It was a revelation to her, as if suddenly discovering that the supposedly normal person she knew had been deaf all his life and had suddenly acquired hearing. It was that acute—almost like another sense, a sixth sense, one that grew and developed as the days went on.

  Once I knew what to look for, I could find it everywhere.

  The rocks, the trees, the animal life of this world, all sang with it over and above their existence as separate entities. It was an incredible sensation, and a beautiful one. The world sang to you, whispered to you.

  People, too—although they were the most difficult partly because their own activities partially masked the effect, so quiet and subtle it was, and partly because it’s almost impossible to observe a human being with the same objectivity as can be applied to a rock or tree or blade of grass. Yet each entity was also unique, and with a little concentration I could not only sense but actually mentally map a particular area with my eyes closed.

  This, I realized, was the key to that mysterious power. My own Warden organisms, inside every cell, perhaps every molecule of my body, were in some way interconnected by some sort of energy to every other Warden organism. It was this interconnection I saw and felt and heard. It had to be what they all saw and felt and heard, all the ones with any vestige of the power.

  A Supervisor sensed, what I sensed and had the ability to send, through his own body’s symbiotes, a message to yours—or to a rock’s or to anything else’s. A Master, then, could do it in more detail—could see the individual parts inside a human body and order changes in the way those cells operated.

  When something died, or if it lost its primary form—such as when a lock was crushed—the Warden organisms died, and without them, the very structure of the thing became unstable and collapsed. A Knight, then, I realized, could somehow keep the Warden organisms alive under those conditions. But even then, the organism attacked and destabilized inorganic matter from outside its environment. Somehow I thought of antibodies, those substances in human blood that attack foreign substances such as viruses that invade our bodies. It seemed to me that the Warden organism acted much like an antibody on inorganic alien matter: it attacked, destabilized, and destroyed it.

  Kreegan, then, could do the impossible—convince the Warden organism not to attack and destroy alien inorganic matter. And each rank could also keep lower ranks from communicating with the Warden organisms inside their own bodies, thus protecting them.

  But what tuned you to your own symbiotes, allowed you to relay commands through them to others outside your own body? That I had yet to discover. The mere discovery that I could sense the communication while most pawns could not was the best thing that could have happened to me. I no longer felt tired or depressed. I had the talent. I needed to explore my powers, test them, learn how to use them, learn my own limits.

  Perhaps I wouldn’t equal the Lord; perhaps I’d need help, a valuable ally.

  - For now, though, it was enough to know, finally, what was what on this mad world—and to know, too, that my days of hauling mud for sixteen hours were numbered.

  More than enough.

  Chapter Seven

  Father Bronz

  Over the following days my increasing sensitivity to the silent communication absorbed me, and I tried to learn everything I could about it. None of the pawns were any help except Ti, who could feel the power but had never learned how to control or use it properly. Since one’s position on Lilith was dependent on mastery of the power—and since social mobility usually led to the death of one of the contestants for a particula
r position—there were, needless to say, no instruction manuals.

  Although I’ve lived with the sensation for quite some time now, it is still nearly impossible to describe. The best objective description I can give is a tremendously heightened sensitivity to an energy flow. The energy is not great and yet you can sense it, not as a static thing but as a continuous and pulsating energy flow from all things solid. Gases and water don’t seem to be affected by the flow, although things living in the water, no matter how tiny, possess it.

  The energy itself is of the same sort—that is, there’s no difference between a flow from a blade of grass, a person, and the insects—and yet the patterns that it forms are unique. You can tell one blade of grass from another, a person from some other large creature; you even get different patterns from the billions of microbes we all carry inside us.

  I was still experimenting when the stranger arrived in our little village. He’d apparently been there most of the day, walking around to different work parties and details, but hadn’t yet reached mine. Early in the evening I finally saw him, relaxing in the common and eating some fruit. He wore a toga of shiny white that seemed to ripple with his every move and a pair of finely crafted sandals that marked him as a man of extreme power. Yet he was sitting there at ease, eating with and socializing with us mere pawns. He was an elderly man, with a fine-lined face and carefully trimmed gray beard, but he was balding badly both in front, where only a widow’s peak remained, and around the top of his head. He looked thin and trim, however, and was in good physical condition, as would be expected. His age could not be guessed, but he would have to have been at least in his seventies, perhaps years older.

  For a fleeting moment the idea entered my naturally suspicious head that this might be Lord Marek Kreegan himself. Why he’d show up here at this particular time, however, was a mystery that pushed coincidence to the limit. Besides, Kreegan would be of standard height and build, as all the other people of the civilized worlds and I had been. This man seemed a bit too short and too broad to fit into that absolute category.