Jack Chalker - Lilith - A Snake in the Grass

Still, the creatures were selectively bred types, born and raised for this sort of work, and they seemed never to tire. They were also easy to care for, since they foraged for themselves in the jungle below, eating almost anything that wouldn’t eat them first, plant or animal. Being large animals, though, they ate often, and that slowed us down. They needed three times their considerable weight per day to keep going at any reasonable pace.

Still, the kilometers passed swiftly beneath us, although I saw less of the countryside than I would have liked. In order to maintain security, and to avoid meeting a lot of possibly bad company, we headed almost due east to the coast and skirted it, somewhat out from land, heading in for an encampment only when and where the wild reached the sea and gave us cover. The ocean was dotted with numerous uninhabited islands, but none provided the large amount of food our besils required, so some risk was necessary.

Our witches afforded us some protection, of course. I suspect that was the only reason we encountered so little in the way of other traffic on the way south. But though we could take care of individuals who might chance upon us we had nothing like the massed force to withstand an assault of the type Artur had mounted on the witch village. Sumiko couldn’t even take her full “core” coven, since the most we could safely fit on and strap into a besil saddle was two, and Ti and I had one, O’Higgins and Bronz each had one of their own, and the other three held two of the aproned witches apiece. We had no control over the besils ourselves, either; Bronz and O’Higgins did the driving for all of us.

Days were spent in foraging, resting, and checking bearings. It was not a totally friendly group, with the witches paying little mind or heed to Ti or me and Father Bronz devoting most of his time, apparently without success, to trying to discover the nature of Sumiko O’Higgins’s remarkable discoveries about the Warden organism.

I confess I was never really sure about the witch queen. A genius, certainly, with the single-mindedness to set herself impossible problems and then work —them out. A pragmatist, too, who was putting her discoveries to use building up some sort of superior army—for what it was hard to say. Discussing the plants and animals of Lilith, the Warden organism, and some rather odd ideas about the relationships between plant and animal biochemistry, she was as expert and as dry as a university professor. But whenever you started feeling that her Satanism was a sham, a device to accomplish some kind of psychological goal with her followers, or simply a means to an end, she would drop into a discussion of it with an unmistakable fervour and sincerity. Ti and I talked about her at length, and both of us were convinced that either she was one of the truly great actresses of all times or she really believed that junk.

I was able to pump Father Bronz a bit more on her, although he admitted his own knowledge was sketchy. She was the daughter of scientists, experts in the biological aspects of terraforming, and from what little we could gather, was something of an experiment herself, having been genetically manipulated in some way in an attempt to produce a superior being, an alternative to the civilized worlds for a rougher, frontier life. Tfiey had certainly produced someone unique, but I wondered what the psychological effects of growing up knowing you were just experiment 77-A in Mommy and Daddy’s lab might be. Exactly what the crime was that got her sent to Lilith was unknown, but it was of truly major proportions and left inside her a legacy of hatred and revenge directed toward the civilized worlds. In point of fact, she was the quintessential Lord of the Diamond personality I’d come to expect, yet she disdained even that. To her, Marek Kreegan and the Confederacy were two sides of the same coin.

The relationship between Ti and me continued to develop, and I felt things within me that I had never known were there. In some ways it disturbed me—that a man of pure intellect could form such strong emotional attachments seemed somehow an admission of my weakness, an internal accusation that I was human when I had always clung to the notion that I was a superior human being above all those animalistic drives affecting the common herd. She was certainly not the type of woman I had ever thought myself attracted to. Bright, yes, but totally uneducated, highly emotional, and in some sense very vulnerable.

Still, I felt better with her here, awake, laughing and oohing and aahing and having fun like a kid with a new toy. It was as if I’d had a painful hole inside me, one that had been there so long that I wasn’t even aware of it, had considered the ache and emptiness normal and not at all unusual, but now the hole was filled. The relief, the feeling of health and wholeness, was indescribably good. We were complementary in some ways, too—she was my hold, my perspective, on Lilith, where I would live out my, life, and I was her window to a wider and far different universe than she could now comprehend.

It took eleven days to reach Moab, with a little dodging of congested areas, neither pushing ourselves or taking chances. Moab Keep itself was below us now, a huge island in a great, broad tropical bay. Almost on the equator, it was insufferably hot and humid; but, looking down upon it, I could see why it had been selected.

The first manned expedition to Lilith had no idea what it would be getting itself into. It needed a base, one that would provide a good sample of the flora and fauna of Lilith without exposing the group to unknown dangers. The huge island of Moab was their choice, a place large and lush enough to provide a small lab and base for travel to other parts of the world but isolated enough with its high cliff walls and broad expanse of bay all around to be defensible against attack.

Time and knowledge had reshaped it only slightly. You could see cleared areas for agriculture, and lines of fruit trees too straight and regular to be haphazard. On a bluff almost in the center of the island was the headquarters for those who still lived and worked on the island. The hard rock of the bluff itself had been hewn out by the most primitive labor methods to build what was needed, a great rock temple that looked neither crude nor uncomfortable. In fact, it made Zeis’s Castle seem like a small and fragile structure, although Moab had none of the fanciful design of Sir Tiel’s edifice. It was straight, modern, utilitarian, functional—and huge.

Still, Father Bronz had warned us that this was not ^exactly all it seemed. The science of the founders was still here, for sure, and there was no authoritarian hierarchy such as the other Keeps maintained, but the purpose for the enclave had drastically changed as it became more isolated from the outside world. Today the thousands of men and women below carried on their work in the name of some odd mystical religion that seemed anachronistically out of the dawn of man. In their years of studying Lilith they had come not merely to anthropomorphize it, as Father Bronz tended to do, but actually to regard it as a living, thinking creature, a god now sleeping that would someday awaken.

In other words, here was another nut cult, although one not formed from the history of humanity but rather by the conditions of Lilith itself.

We landed atop the great bluff and immediately attendants came from stairwells to attend to the besils. For a moment I thought we were being attacked, so rapidly did they come forth, but it quickly became obvious that we were on the Moab equivalent of a helipad.

I took note of the appearance of the attendants. Many were of civilized worlds standards, and all had some of the look within them. Many were naked, others lightly dressed, and all seemed young, yet none of them had the look or bearing of pawns. All were neatly groomed and had that scrubbed look.