Jack Chalker - Lilith - A Snake in the Grass

Father Bronz spotted us. “Call Ti! Please come over!” he called pleasantly, and we did. Up close Bronz looked dead tired, and very, very old. He’s put on at least ten years this morning, I thought. Still, he rose wearily from his chair, took my hand warmly, then kissed Ti on the forehead. Only then did he turn and nod toward the others.

“Some of these fine people you know,” he began, “but I don’t think you ever met Sir Honlon Tiel.” The thin old man nodded in my direction, and I could only stare at him. So that was the knight I was to take on, I thought glumly. The Boss of Zeis Keep. The Warden cells glowed more in Artur than in him.

“The gentleman in gold there is Grand Duke Kob6,” Bronz continued, and the other also nodded. He also introduced the others, but they were all of Zeis’s ruling group. Then he turned back to me. “I assume you understand everything now?”

“Pretty much,” I told him. “I can’t say it makes me happy to be used in such a way, though. I feel like the child promised the new toy he’s always wanted for his birthday, only to have nobody even come to his party, let alone getting the gift.”

Bronz laughed. “Oh, come now! It’s not all that bad.”

“Will somebody,” Ti interrupted in an even but slightly angry voice, “ please tell me what the hell is going on here?”

I looked at her and sighed. “Ti, may I present Ma-rek Kreegan, Lord of Lilith, First Lord of the Diamond?”

The fact that she gasped when Father Bronz bowed indicated she still had a lot to learn.

The full explanation came later, after we’d bathed, changed, and sat down to a sumptuous feast in the great hall of the Castle. Ti still hadn’t recovered from the shock of Father Bronx’s true identity, but given that, she had managed to figure out the basics, I’ll give her that. And she was mad as hell.

Still, I wanted to hear the tale from the man who had planned it all.

“From the top, then,” agreed Marek Kreegan. “Of course, we had a problem. Lilith, as I told you long ago, is a rigid ecosystem “in which we humans play no part. Its economy is fragile, its ability to support a large population in the wild very much in doubt without Warden protection of the masses. The pawns don’t enjoy a wonderful life—but who does? The ruling class, always, that’s who. Because while everybody would love to be king, if everybody was a king there’d be no labor to support this monarch. The civilized worlds are no different, only thanks to technology on a massive scale the standard of living for their pawns is higher than is currently possible on Lilith.”

“I still can’t see the masses on the civilized worlds as pawns with a privileged class,” I responded.

His eyebrows rose. “Oh? Were you born in that body?”

“You know I wasn’t,” I growled.

“Exactly. The Merton Process, right? Potential immorality for anybody and everybody, right? But will the masses get it? Of course not! For the same reason that cures for the big three diseases that kill people have been withheld. We are at maximum and the frontier can expand only so fast. New planets take decades to develop, particularly to the point of self-sufficiency. Cal, no system can survive if its population doesn’t die. Nor is the Merton Process’ any cure-all, since you need a body for it. That means massive cloning—a couple of trillion clones. Ridiculous. They have to be raised and supported by some biomechanical means until needed. But the leaders of the Confederacy, now—that’s a different matter. They’re already immunized against diseases people don’t even know are killing them. They get age-retardant processes like mad. And when they finally do wear out, they now have the Merton Process to keep ’em going for an infinite number of cycles. The masses count, in Confederacy society, only in the plural. Masses. Averages. Everything’s an average. Only the elite get the plums. Exactly the same as here.”

“I’ll agree with you to a point,” I admitted, “but leadership is available to those who wish it.”

Again he laughed. “Really? You think so? You think you got where you were because of willpower and dedication? Hell, man, you were bred for it. They designed and manufactured you as they would any tool they needed, because they needed it. The same as they did me.”

“But you crossed them up,” I noted. “That’s why you’re here.”

He shrugged good-naturedly. “The trouble with their system is that their human tools have to be smart guys and they have to be thrown out into the cold, cruel world to do-their jobs. Eventually we wise up and have to be eliminated ourselves before we become a threat. That’s done by promotion to the inner circle—if they can fit you someplace—or sometimes by just having a junior knock you off. Hell, they can do it just by having you show up at the Security Clinic for normal processing, then instead of feeding you your past and what you need, reducing you to the common pawn vegetable with a nice little job as a widget monitor or something. I discovered this fact almost too late and mostly by accident, and I ran like hell.”

“To Lilith,” I noted. “Why in heaven’s name Lilith?” Everybody at the table laughed at that, except of course the native-born.

“I’m not going to tell you,” he responded. “At least not until we’ve gotten that damned organic transmitter removed from your skull and until you’ve been around enough to know whose side you’re really on.”

“The aliens,” I muttered, feeling like my last secrets were being stripped from me. He even knew about the transmitter.

He grinned and shrugged. “Let’s just say, ah, powerful friends of mine—of all Warden citizens, but mostly of the Four Lords of the Diamond. Anyway, it must surely have occurred to you that any civilization able to penetrate the security chamber of Military Systems Command would have no trouble at all finding out about the Merton Process. And report same to me, who knows better than anybody how the great minds of the Confederacy run. I know they’d zero in on Lilith because I was running the place, and that the only logical person to send would be someone whose own past and career matched mine as closely as possible.”

I said nothing to this because I’d been a lot slower than he was giving me credit for, a fact I didn’t like at all.

“Well, anyway, we knew you were coming,” continued the Lord of Lilith, “and, Confederacy Intelligence being what it is, I had to figure that any agent sent down here would most logically duplicate my own initial situation as closely as possible, since they were setting one assassin to catch another. That meant Zeis Keep, since I had started here. That meant I just had to wait until Zeis got a new prisoner. Then you turned up. After your seasoning, I stepped in to size you up a bit and tantalize you as well. It was pretty clear to me that you were somewhat in the doldrums and needed a swift lack in the pants you couldn’t wear then to get moving. Ti was the all-too-obvious leverage.”

I glanced over at Ti, and she bristled. The full implications of what a “pawn” really was were dawning on her, and she didn’t like it one bit.

“So, anyway,” he went on, “I had already established myself in your mind as the only independent spirit on Lilith and told you pretty much where I was heading. Then I came back here and ordered Dr. Pohn to take Ti. I figured that, if you were anything like me, you’d get so damned mad you’d come after her, and that meant you’d have to have a Warden explosion. You were already ripe—I could see it in you.”

“And if it hadn’t happened?”

He smiled. “Then you weren’t any good to me or to the Confederacy and you would have been abandoned to plant beans for the rest of your life. But of course it did happen, the night of the banquet. When Dola came and told us here, we immediately made plans on what we’d do next. We had to expose you to Dr. Pohn at his worst, for example, and Ti in that totally helpless condition at his villainous “mercy. We had to show you not only Master Artur but his troops and beasts as well—Artur usually doesn’t show newcomers around personally, you know—so you’d realize it’d take an armed force to come after Zeis Keep. And of course we had to test you for Warden potential and give you a taste of what that power is like without actually giving you that power right off. Vola took care of that, then also got you on the run with that wonderful piece of midnight theatrics. I of course was nowhere near at the time, since I already had to be far to the south to lay my trail for you to follow.”