Jack Chalker - Lilith - A Snake in the Grass

Pohn, however, knew.

“They’re so still,” I noted. “Drugged?”

He shook his head. “Oh my, no! That would simply complicate things. No, I simply applied a block to certain areas of the brain, one I can remove at will. They go into deep coma and I can then study them, probe, do whatever I want or need to do. Of the batch, I’m looking for ones with key enzymes in sufficient quantities perhaps to trigger the power. Those I’ll work with until I feel I can trigger them at will; then I’ll start trying to educate and train them as best we can. Kria there, for example, can now dissolve solid rock at my command.” He pointed at one girl near the door.

I frowned. I had a bad, uneasy feeling about all this and about Pohn in general. Why was a doctor like this on Lilith at all? I asked myself. Did he perhaps have an unhealthy fondness for little girls? Or did he perhaps experiment capriciously on such people back Outside? I knew him now, although I’d never met him or heard of him before. There have always been people like Dr. Pohn in human history, the monsters whose thirst for experimentation caused a total disregard for any concept of morality. Shades of the old story about the man who’d created a bloodthirsty monster, leaving the question of who truly was the monster—the thing, or the man who created it?

These young girls—reduced to zombies, biological specimens, perhaps playthings for this man’s sport. I thought of Ti in his hands and didn’t like what I was thinking at all. Still, I said nothing of my feelings. Instead I asked, “I assume you’re trying breeding experiments, too?”

He nodded. “Oh, yes. Based on the idea that the proper chemical in the proper amount is an inherited and inheritable characteristic. Frankly, I doubt it is more than one in many factors, but Sir Tiel is obsessed with the idea. I’m afraid that his level of biological sophistication is about on a par with the belief of spontaneous generation, but what can I do? I work for the man, and he’s a skillful and able administrator. I humor him; he indulges me. What’s the harm?”

What’s the harm? 1 thought sourly. What, indeed? As long as you didn’t regard any of these girls as more than lumps of flesh, no higher or lower than the great insects raised and bred in the Keep. That was the barbarity at the core of this civilization, I told myself. Only a select few were people.

Precisely the underlying philosophy you’d expect on a world run by the most brilliant criminal masterminds humanity had spawned. Men like Dr. Pohn, sociopathic and probably psychopathic—and men like Cal Tremon, pirate and mass murderer, I reminded myself.

“We really have to ring for Artur now,” Pohn said, turning and leaving the chamber. I followed him. “I’m afraid I’ve taken much too long with you, and it doesn’t pay to get him too angry.”

“This Artur—what did he do? Outside, I mean?”

“To get here?” the doctor chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know the details. He was somebody very big in the Confederacy military hierarchy, I think. A general, maybe, or an admiral. Ignited the atmosphere of some planet years ago, as I remember. Killed a few billion people. Something like that. Always said he was scape-goated for doing somebody else’s dirty work. That’s all I know. A nasty man, though.”

I had to agree. Killed a few billion people…

Given enough time I’d remember who he was, I was sure of that. I’d also remember that the comment on the death toll meant as little to Dr. Pohn as if the death toll had been in cockroaches.

Master Artur was prompt and didn’t seem the least put-out. He was just as cold and mean as always, with no trace of anything more or less. I began to wonder if the man were human.

For the next hour or so we went on a tour of the Castle, armed with a nicely drawn map that Artur handed to me. The place was very logically laid out more or less in a D shape, with corridors fanning out in all directions to main function halls and rooms, each of which were also connected in the rear semicircle by service passages. Along each corridor were living quarters, storage, and other necessities, including group bathrooms. The corridors were arranged somewhat on a caste basis, with the bulk of them devoted to the Supervisor class that did the real work 01 the place, then the two on either side of the central passage for Master rank, and the center of course leading to Sir Tiel’s luxurious quarters and those of his immediate family.

Not shown on the map, I noticed, were the inevitable secret passages between rooms and those perhaps above and below as well, such as the one from which they spied on me. Their absence didn’t surprise me, but I decided that I really wanted to know more about them.

Outside the Castle Artur’s pride and joy was quartered in a large compound against the side of the hills. It was almost a stockade, made of great logs with catwalks and guard towers that reminded me of some primitive fortress. Artur had been totally cold, dry, and formal during our tour and seemed distant from everything and everybody, but now he seemed to warm and those chilly eyes lit up.

“Not a part of the regular tour,” he told me, “but I have to go down and check them out anyway, so you might as well come along.”

“Them” turned out to be enclosed herds of great insects the likes of which I had not really seen before on Lilith or anywhere else. Trained Supervisor-grade personnel scurried about when Artur approached, so by the time we entered the huge compound they were all set and waiting for him. Lines of them, rows and rows of them, in tight quarters but nonetheless mighty impressive.

They sat there in formation, huge wuks, as they were called, their bodies a bright green with a whitish underbelly; they were fully three or four meters long on six thick, powerful bent legs, their heads dominated by great luminous ovoid eyes flanking a curled, whip like proboscis that concealed a nasty, beaklike mouth. Their skins were perfectly smooth, but I got the impression of a strong skeleton just beneath that made them far less fragile than they looked.

Each had a saddle tied to it between the first and second pair of legs; it was an elaborate seat with a hard back and an X-shaped restraint to cover their riders and hold them in. The riders, in black pants and boots, were both male and female, but all looked tough, hard, and well-disciplined. There was an array of what I could only guess were weapons, from pikes and staffs to what might very well have been blow-guns. They were situated-so that the restrained rider could get at them easily and quickly.

“I am impressed,” I told Artur (and-1 wasn’t kidding). “But this looks like an army to me—mounted cavalry. I wouldn’t think you’d need an army here.” Artur chuckled. “Oh, yes, indeed we do,” he responded. “You see, basically in order to move up in this society you have to kill somebody—be stronger than they were. Now, you tell me—it you were Sir Tiel, would you keep going day after day in challenges against everybody who thinks he can knock you off? Of course not And neither do any of the other knights. And what do you get for it? A lot of bowing and scraping, of course, but mostly a shitload of administrative headaches. There are probably hundreds of masters stronger than most of the knights, maybe even stronger than the Duke himself, but they just don’t want the job. A lot do, though. So I’m charged with seeing that it’s a bit more difficult to challenge the Knight of the Keep—a policeman, you might say. And if one knight wants something another knight has, well, they can challenge knight to knight —but they’d probably end up either dead or in a draw, so there’s no profit in it. So we fight a little. Anybody who wants anything from this Keep has to either bargain for it in a nice way or fight for it—and that’s where these troops come in.”