Jack Chalker - Lilith - A Snake in the Grass

Not yet, I decided. Not yet.

Classes started shortly after. They decided that both Ti and I would undergo as much training as we could take, although separately, of course. Only the basic stuff could be group-administered, and I’d already had that. I was curious to see what Ti might come up with, and hopeful, too.

I had been somewhat nervous when told that they were a religious cult, but aside from a few offhand references and the fact that there were occasional prayers, like before meals, and temple hours, when the staff went off somewhere and did whatever they did, there was no pushing of the faith, no mumbo-jumbo, and no attempt either to convert us or to indoctrinate us with their beliefs. Their religion interested me no more than the faiths of Bronz or O’Higgins did, and I was thankful for its lack of intrusiveness.

Of the others who had come with us I saw nothing. About two weeks into the training I was informed that the witches had gone, returning to their strange village, but Father Bronz was said to be involved in some project of his own at the Institute, something that required the use of their massive handwritten library scrolls and some of their lab facilities. I wondered idly whether he, now seeing that it was possible, was trying to crack the O’Higgins secret.

I made easy progress in the use of the power itself, but I began to realize that things would still be very slow, since, as Ti’s example had so graphically pointed out, just having the power to do something wasn’t enough. You needed the knowledge to apply it properly, and that could take years.

Still, a lot could be done in general terms, and it became absurdly easy for me to do so. Weaving patterns, duplicating patterns as I had with the chair, were sun-pie as long as we were talking inanimate objects. O’Higgins had likened the Warden organism to some sort of alien organic computer, and that was a pretty good analogy. But not a lot of little computers, all components in a single, massively pre-programmed organism.

’Think of them,” one of my instructors said, “as cells of Mother Lilith. Your own cells all contain DNA spirals encoded with your entire genetic makeup. Also, one part of that complex code tells that particular cell how to behave, how to form and grow and act and react as part of the whole. The Warden cells, as we call them, are like those in your own body. They are pre-programmed with an impossibly complex picture of how this planet should be, and each one knows its own place or part in that whole; What we do is slightly mutate the Warden cell. Essentially, we feed it false data and fool it into doing what we want instead of what it wants. Because our action is extremely localized when compared to the whole of Lilith, and because we can concentrate our willpower on such a tiny spot, we are able to do so. Not on a large scale, of course, but on a relatively localized scale.”

I looked around at the sumptuous surroundings of the Institute. “Localized?”

My instructor just nodded. “Consider the mass of the planet. Consider the number of molecules that go into its composition. A colony of Wardens for every molecule. Now, do you think this is more than a tiny aberration, a benign cancer, as it were?”

I saw the point.

The more I practiced, the easier everything became. Although I was a little put off when I discovered that most of the silky cloth I’d seen was made from worm spit, I soon dismissed that as another cultural prejudice and had my own clothing with the option and ability to make more. Burning holes in rock and shaping those holes to suit my design also proved very easy: you just told the Wardens governing the molecules to disengage. Unfortunately, the skill aspect again came into play here, and I decided that I was cut out to be neither an engineer nor an architect. What I had done to Kronlon, the Institute considered an abuse of power, since what it seemed to amount to was an overloading of the Warden input circuits. They burned themselves out in some manner.

Classes in combat emphasized defense, but took a lot of the mystery out of what I’d seen. Knowing the proper points in an opponent’s nervous system was as important in the mental combat of Warden cells as in physical stuff like judo. The trick was to keep total control over your own Wardens while knocking out those of your opponent, a really nasty task requiring not only that you have more willpower and self-control than your opponent but also that you have an enormous ability to concentrate on several things at once.

I learned as much as I could learn, and although I felt elated when they no longer gave me the potion and I grew stronger still, I realized that only experience could fine-tune my skills. The key test of my power was when they brought two small steel rods from Medusa, which, though containing Warden organisms as well, was a thing alien to our Lilith parent strain and beyond my ability to communicate with.

I was aware, though, that Warden cells were already attacking the alien matter, much as antibodies attacked a virus in the bloodstream, trying to break it down, even eat it, in some mysterious way.

Here there was no pattern to solve or imitate. I somehow had to work out a form of protection, some sort of message that would keep this metal from corroding to dust under the Warden cell onslaught. I failed miserably time after time. There seemed nothing to grab on to, nothing I could even reprogram to protect the alien matter, which even to me had a somewhat dark, dead appearance in Contrast to all of the Warden-alive matter around me.

After two days the stuff crumbled into dust.

I was discouraged, feeling somehow inadequate. To have come so far and not to go the last little bit to rank me near the top in potential on this world was tremendously depressing. If I could not solve this last problem, I knew I would be no match for the Dukes, let alone for Marek Kreegan.

Ti tried to console me. But, living here at the Institute at a higher level than she’d ever dreamed of or known was possible, she had a more limited ambition than I. Her own lessons had helped somewhat; as both Sumiko O’Higgins and Dr. Pohn had intimated, the •power was at least latent in everyone. But even with all the training, her power was limited more to the Supervisor level, although she certainly could use it more discriminatingly and effectively than the Supervisors I’d known. The only thing they could offer beyond that was something of the witch methods: if she were truly consumed with emotion toward something, her power could be multiplied; but to make it controlled and effective she’d need temporary augmentation from the potion. Even then it would be only a destructive power and very limited.

This aspect worried me a bit at first, since she was highly emotional and I was more than a little concerned that lovemaking would cause problems. Occasionally it did, but not anything serious, since she would never aim anything destructive, even subconsciously, at me. If ever we had a falling out, I was strong enough on reflex alone to protect myself. Still, occasionally when we did make love and her power ran a bit wild, the earth really did move.

Her powers, particularly with my help, allowed her to create her own clothes, which was particularly important to one brought up in the pawn world of the Keeps, where clothing was status. Still, she had enough of an understanding of the Warden power to understand my problem and my frustration, and did think of it. In fact she came up with part of the solution.

“Look,” she said to me one day, “the problem is that Warden cells ridin ’dust and everything else in the air just rush in to eat this metal stuff, right?”

I nodded glumly. “And I can’t stop it because that metal stuff, as you call it, doesn’t have anything I can talk to, let alone control.”