Jack Chalker - Lilith - A Snake in the Grass

Even in my statistically small sample, then, the women were numerically superior to the men. Perhaps Pohn had more reason to confine his experiments to young women than just perversion.

I looked around again at these—witches. Dismiss the religious cultism, the “savage” label, all the rest, and reduce it to what was known. Their chief was one who had the power in spades—Bronz had said she might be in Kreegan’s class had she had training, but as I knew only too well, such power even untrained can be enormous if emotionally aroused, and hate was one of the best emotions for that sort of thing. Sumiko. O’Higgins hated Zeis, if only for the principle of the thing—Zeis had Pohn, and Pohn had done a number on Ti, a woman.

These others… Even though most looked like pawns, were they? There was something here I was missing, unless Satan, Prince of Darkness, really had something here. Something had kept this tempting target for Keeps all around safe and secure—so secure O’Higgins dared bring her most powerful personnel to collect us.

It was getting close to dawn, and I was becoming more and more nervous. O’Higgins and Father Bronz had been at it all night, making plans of some kind or another—an odd couple if there ever was one, I decided—and finally the priest emerged from a hut and came over to me. “You look lousy,” he said.

“You don’t look so bright and eager either,” I responded glumly. “But how’d you expect me to sleep through something like this?”

He sat down wearily. “I need some strong tea to wake me up,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “She’s really got something here. I have to hand it to her. I don’t know if it’ll work or not, but if it does, it’s almost revolutionary. No, it is revolutionary.”

I stared at him.“Give. What are you talking about?”

“You remember our talks on the balance on Lilith? Well, she seems to have something that upsets that balance, at least a little.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You see these women? All virgins, believe it or not, at least with men. All exhibited strong wild talents at puberty, although most subsided to pawn status, as •per normal, after a few months to a year.”

“You can’t tell me O’Higgins is a virgin,” I commented.

He chuckled. “Hard to say. I doubt if she’s ever been to bed with a man, if that’s what you mean, and that’s all that seems to count in this business. There may be something to the old legend of virgins having more power in magical things—in a purely biological sense, Lilith style, I mean. Perhaps some very tiny chemical changes were not introduced. I don’t know. But Sumiko got this idea, after combing the savages of the wild, that it was so. She may be crazy but she’s not stupid. She was once a pretty good biochemist Outside, so don’t sell her short no matter what her crazy beliefs now. At any rate, when she got sent to Lilith she didn’t stay a pawn very long. Hot-blooded. Got so damned mad she not only fried her supervisor but stalked angrily out of a Keep to the west of here, glowing, it’s said, like a firecracker from the Warden power, injuring or killing anybody who even tried to get in her way.”

“None of that catalyst?” I responded unbelievingly.

He shook his head. “None. Now you see what I mean. She was in the wild for a while before she even found out about the stuff. She wasn’t just a biochemist, Cal—she was a botanist. It took her months, but she found out what the catalyst was and worked out her own methods for distilling it. How she did it without tools, without a lab, and without even the facilities of a Keep we’ll never know—sheer guts and willpower, I’d say. Cal, I don’t know what she’s come up with, but it isn’t quite the nice, pure stuff you and I got, so it isn’t as effective, but it works. She recruited all these women when they were very young, just for their wild-talent potential—and, I suspect, their sexual orientation. For short periods of tune—I don’t know duration —she can dose every woman here with the stuff. Awaken all their old wild talents. Use the cult beliefs and discipline to shape and direct them.” He sighed. “You know, in an hour or two I think old Artur may be in for a big surprise.”

I thought about what he said and it gave me some immediate hope, but the more I thought about it the more I realized its long-term implications.

Pawns were hardly celibate—Ti, for example, would never make a witch for this group—but if O’Higgins really did have this stuff it was the equivalent of a fusion bornb to Lilith.

“Bronz, how many women does she have here?”

He was resting, and for a moment I thought he was asleep. But one eye opened. “Thirteen tunes thirteen. What did you expect?”

One hundred and sixty-nine women, I thought. All handpicked by somebody who knew exactly what she was doing and what she was looking for. All with demonstrated wild talents of major proportions, and with a little chemical aid to awaken those locked-away powers; all fiercely loyal to their leader and mother figure.

“She hasn’t got a Satanist nut cult here,” I said aloud, “she’s got the kernel of a revolutionary army.”

“So it took you that long to figure all that out?” Father Bronz muttered sleepily:

The facts weren’t all that reassuring. I really wasn’t quite sure if I’d like a world fashioned by Sumiko O’Higgins as well as I liked the one run by Marek Kreegan. I wondered idly what the witch-queen’s offense had been to have her sent here. Nothing pleasant, that was for sure.

As the sun rose the entire company of witches went through what appeared to be a solemn ceremony that involved, as far as I could see, cursing the sun for rising and spoiling the lovely night and asking for Satan’s aid in the coming fight. In the center area, over the restoked fire, a giant gourd caldron bubbled and hissed.

After morning “prayers,” each and every one of the women approached the caldron and, with an incantation, drank the hot, foul-smelling liquid from a crudely fashioned dipper. I felt helpless in the coming fight and wished for some of that brew, but Bronz would have none of it.

“Sumiko says the stuff would play hell with your nervous system,” he told me. “I’m not sure I believe it, but we’re the guests here. You just stay back and watch what happens—and keep out of the way. They’ll have spears, poison darts, blowguns, bows and arrows, and even crossbows. Your duty is to stay down and out of the way. If you get killed, then all this will have been for nothing.”

I started to argue, but his logic was unassailable. I went to Ti’s hut, now emptied of its other occupants, and looked down at her.

She moaned, turned over, and opened her eyes, seeing me. “Hi,” she muttered weakly.

“Hi, yourself,” I responded, not bothering to hide my big grin. “You know where you are?”

She groaned and tried to sit up, failed the first time, then managed it. “Sort of,” she told me. “It was—kinda like a crazy dream. I was sound asleep, and I knew I was sound asleep, but I could hear stuff when there was stuff to hear and see stuff when my eyes were open. It was all dreamy like, though, not real.” She hesitated a second, looking puzzled and serious. “But it was real, wasn’t it, Cal ? All of it? That creepy doctor, that horrible room, you rescuing me, Father Bronz, witches—they really are witches, aren’t they, Cal?”

I nodded. “Sort of. At least they think they are.”

She stared at me with the kind of expression I had never seen anyone give me before. “You could’ve got out real easy, but you took me,” she whispered, low and almost to herself. Her voice broke slightly and she said, “Oh, Cal, hold me! Hug me! Please!”