Jack Chalker - Lilith - A Snake in the Grass

“But I heard a voice…”

“Duke Kob6, I’m afraid, using a reed tube,” he responded. Kob6 shrugged apologetically. “It was important that natural early suspicions about me be allayed. I couldn’t be Kreegan in the hallways and also have gone to several Keeps in the time allowed, not without you finding out about it. I counted on you to file that away in your mind. On the other hand, I had to be the only person to whom you could turn for help.”

“You took a chance there,” I noted, nettled by his manner. “I could just have gone to the wild.”

“I never took a chance with you,” he replied. “If at any time you hadn’t been up to the job for one reason or another I could simply quit and find somebody else. But I had some insurance in Ti, here.”

She shot him a glance that, had she had my Warden power, would have demolished the, hall.

“Remember,” Kreegan said, “I’m forty years your senior, but we came out of the same background, went through the same training, did the same job for the same bosses. Oh, the faces and names change occasionally, but it’s always the same bosses. It’s a stratified and static society with a system it believes works. As a result, I knew how you thought. I could simply put myself in your place, decide what I’d have done, and act accordingly.”

“How were you so sure I’d take Ti, though?” Again he grinned. “Well, first of all, your reaction to Ti had been strong enough to trigger the Warden effect and get you to the Castle. So you had to be emotionally attached to her. Additionally, Dr. Pohn was an inducement if you cared anything about her. However, just in case you suddenly turned into the total pragmatist of your self-image, Vola mixed a mild hypnotic herb in with the first batch of juice; this —reinforced your tendencies, shall we say. I needed Ti. She was essential. You had to take her, since she was the only possible inducement for Sumiko O’Higgins to get involved.”

“Did you get her?” I asked.

He nodded. “But that’s getting ahead of things. You must understand the threat she represented. She was a psychopath such as comes along only once in a century or more, thank heavens. There are some monsters who, when caught, deserve to be exterminated and had better be. Sumiko was one such. Had she not been caught in a fluke accident, she’d have accomplished the actual genetic code of the Institute for Biological Stability that determines the future look of the civilized worlds. Not just the look—well, you know how much genetics can really determine.”

“You just got through telling me that the civilized worlds needed changing,” I pointed out.

“Change, perhaps,” he replied, “but—monsters, Cal. Monsters in standard civilized world guise. They should have gotten rid of her, wiped her, vaporized her—but instead they sent her to Lilith, on the theory that anybody that smart might come up with something unusual. And she sure did!”

I nodded. “I got a whiff of her plans, thanks to Ti.”

“Not the half of it,” Kreegan told me. “You have no idea what a brilliance that twisted mind had. To tailor-made mutations in existing organisms. Mental genetic engineering! We had word of her activities, of course. She was hardly quiet about her recruiting of young women, that sort of thing. They performed human sacrifices, too, there in that village common. The same stone on which Ti rested was designed to hold a living human being; the grooves there were to drain off the blood, which they would all then drink. She was sick, Cal. Sick and enough of a genius to pull it all off. We had to stop her—but thanks to her brilliance, we couldn’t even find her.”

I nodded again, seeing it all. “And, as Artur proved, she was unassailable even if you had been able to find her.”

The sergeant-at-arms grumbled to himself.

“That’s about it,” Kreegan agreed. “Understand, she had discovered nothing that the Institute didn’t already know about, but the Institute goes to a lot of trouble to keep things stable here. Using you and particularly Ti, I was able to get us all to her village. There I could tantalize her enough that I felt sure she’d come with us to the Institute—and come she did. A lot of evaluation went on there, without her knowledge, although she also learned from the library things she needed to know. Shortcuts, so to speak. We had to give her crumbs just to keep her as long as we could. Afterward, we had long discussions on what to do, the extent of her power, that sort of thing. We felt we’d given her enough new material for her to grow overconfident, and so it only remained to play fiie trump card—offer her a chance to find out how strong she really was. We made the bait as irresistible as possible.”

“The object, in other words, was to create a situation by which Sumiko would leave her protective haven, split her forces, and not suspect that the enemy was not merely Zeis but everyone else.”

“That is true,” Boss Rognival put in. “And the cost was great. We truly had to fight one another until they all landed on the beachhead. That was difficult but unavoidable. Regardless, we deployed sufficiently to allow some Zeis forces to get through and knock out as many witches as possible. Weaken her. But We could not close in on her forces and destroy them until the bitch herself was dead.”

“Just out of curiosity, Kreegan, how did you kill her?” I asked.

“Oh, I had several options,” he replied. “As a last resort we had, thanks to the Institute, enough of the amplifier potion to mass me, the Duke, here, two knights, and about forty Masters against her—but we didn’t have to, for which I’m thankful. I had no idea how powerful she really was—still don’t—and I didn’t want to find out. It was you, Cal, who gave me the idea.”

I started. “Me?”

He nodded. “When you told me about her laser pistol. I figured she’d have it with her for insurance, and particularly for afterward. Look, only a Lord can stabilize off world metal. You know that. That gives you some idea of her power.”

I frowned. “But what does that… ?”

“Come on, Cal ! If you were in my shoes, and had my power, and if you knew she had a laser pistol on her, what would you do? Particularly knowing that her entire mind, her whole concentration, was elsewhere?”

My mouth fell open in surprise as I realized what he had done. “You concentrated on nothing but that pistol,” I told him. “You undid the Warden pattern on the insulating coating. The Warden cells in the area would start immediately attacking the pistol.”

He smiled and nodded. “Yep. It exposed the power supply, which overloaded and exploded. She had it tucked in her belt at the time. I’ll tell you, I sweated blood waiting for that to happen. I was only going to give it another few minutes before we switched to a mass attack and damn the consequences. But it blew, praise God, and the bang was the signal for everybody to stop fighting, join hands, and take those witches from all quarters.”

“You still took a terrible chance,” I noted. “It could have gone off any time—maybe hours later. And you yourself said your mass attack might not have been strong enough.”

“I’ll admit I had a third backup,” he said tiredly. “The Wardens act fast, but not that fast. If all else had failed, my orbital satellite would have released a null-missile right into Zeis. Everyone and everything would have been atomized, but of course so would all the witches. That’s how seriously I took the threat.”

That answered all the questions.

“What about this Father Bronz act?” I asked him. “You couldn’t just invent the character.”