Jack Chalker: Lilith: A Snake in the Grass

The young man said nothing for almost a minute, then: “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Four times damned, yet also not damned at all,” the commander came back. “So you see, there’s no risk. We already have your imprint.”

He considered the facts. “Still, there’d have to be a more recent one,” he noted. “It wouldn’t do to have four of me wake up en route to the Warden Diamond in different bodies with no knowledge of the last fourteen months, not to mention this conversation.”

Krega nodded. “You’re right, of course. But I have mine updated annually, anyway. Except for the headache, if the process worked the first time it’ll work ever after.”

“That’s reassuring,” the man replied uncomfortably, considering that they had done it to him without his knowledge before—and the commander’s words implied that sometimes it didn’t work. Dismissing that idea from his mind, he asked, “But how do I get the data to correlate? Even supposing that these four versions of me are able to ferret out everything you want to know—how do / know it?”

Krega reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a small box. He opened it gingerly and pushed it over to the young man. “With this,” he said flatly.

The man looked at the object. “This” turned out to be a tiny little bead of unknown substance so small it could hardly be seen with the naked eye even in its black velveteen setting.

“A tracer implant?” The young man was sceptical. “What good does that do us?” The device was familiar to all cops; it could be implanted anywhere on a body with no chance of detection and with no operation necessary. Once in place, someone could follow its signal to just about anywhere—a common police tool.

“Not a tracer,” the commander told him. “Based on it, 111 admit, but more a by-product of the Merton researches. It is implanted directly into a specific point in the brain—I’m sorry I don’t have enough technical biology to explain further. You’ll get one, too. It only works when two bodies have exactly the same brain pattern; otherwise you get gibberish. Using the tracer part, a special receiver can locate the wearer anywhere on a planet, then lock onto him, receive, and enonnously amplify what it receives, which then is fed to a Merton recorder. From that another imprint can be made, a ‘soft’ one, that win give its matched mate a record of just what happened after the new body awoke until we took the readout It’s soft—they tell me the sensation is kind of like! seeing a movie all at once. But it’s a record of everything your counterpart said and did. We’ll put you on a guard picket ship, very comfortable, and take almost continuous soft imprints using monitor satellites. You’ll have your information, all right. And the thing’s actually a quasi-organic substance, so even on Lilith, which hates everything alien, it will continue to function as part of the body. We know. We have a couple of people with tracers down there now—they don’t know it, of course. Just a test. Works fine.”

The young man nodded. “You seem to have thought of everything.” He paused a moment. “And what if I refuse after all this? Or to put it another way, what if I say to go ahead and my, ah, alter egos decide once down there not to cooperate?”

Krega grinned evilly. “Consider what I’m offering. We have the capacity to make you immortal—if you succeed. If you succeed, no reward would be high enough. You are an atheist. You know that when you go, you go forever—unless you succeed. Then you, and because of the soft imprints, your alter egos as well will continue to exist. Continue to live on. I think that is quite an inducement.”

The young man looked thoughtful. “I wonder if they will see it that way?” he mused, only half aloud.

Four Lords of the Diamond, pour enormously powerful, clever people to kill. Four keys to an enigma that could spell the end of humanity. Five problems, five puzzles.

Krega didn’t really have to offer a reward. The assignment was irresistible.

The base ship was seven kilometers long. It floated there off the Warden system, about a quarter of a light-year from the sun. Designed as a floating base, almost a mini-world, the ship was completely self-contained, and were it not for the feeling of isolation all around, a pretty comfortable duty.

From its lower decks sped the picket ships: one-man or often totally automated vessels that encircled the Warden system and kept the base ship in constant touch with every section of space around and inside the solar system itself. All commerce had to come here first, then be transferred to automated craft for an in-system run. No one but the military was allowed beyond the perimeter the picket ships established, and even military personnel never landed. The penalty for any violation was simple—capture if possible, elimination if not possible. Between the automatic guardians and the manned patrols a violator might get by one or two, but he would have to run a gauntlet of several hundred to get anywhere meaningful—and do so against the best defensive computers known.

For this reason, the pinpointing of the Warden Diamond as the center of some alien conspiracy was met with a great deal of skepticism by the organized military forces, most of which believed that the alien robot -had simply practiced misdirection in desperation after being discovered.

The analytical computers and strategic specialists thought otherwise. At least, they couldn’t afford not to think otherwise, which explained the arrival of a very special man at the base ship. They all knew he was special, and rumors abounded as to who he was, whom he worked for, and what he was doing there; but no one, not even the commanding admiral, really knew for sure.

With the man came a complete module that niter-locked to the building-block nature of the base ship in the security control section. Prom here the mysterious man would do whatever he was doing, away from all others, surrounded by security guards who had no idea who he was or what he was doing—and who could not enter the module any more than the admiral could. It was keyed to the man’s own brain waves, voice print, retinal pattern, gene structure, and just about everything else any paranoid security division had ever figured out. Anyone else attempting entry would be instantly stopped and neatly packaged for security. Any nonliving thing that tried would be instantly vaporized.

Although the man had been there for months, not a soul even knew his name. Not that he was totally withdrawn—on the contrary, he joined in the sports games in Recreation, ate his meals in the Security Mess, even wined and dined some female soldiers and civilians aboard, many of whom were simply intrigued by this man of mystery. He was likable, easygoing, relaxed. But in all those months he had not revealed the slightest thing about himself, not even to those with whom he’d been most intimate—although, security officers noted, he’d had a positive knack of finding out the most private things about the people with whom he’d come in contact. They admired him for his total self-control and absolute professionalism, and even the highest-ranking of them were scared stiff of him.

He spent several hours most days in his little cubicle, and always slept there. They all wondered and guessed at what was inside until they were almost crazy with curiosity, but they never guessed the truth.

He heard the buzzer sounding as he entered the command module and for the first tune felt genuine excitement and anticipation. Long ago he’d accomplished all he could with the physical data, but for too long now it had been a boring exercise. The computer filed what it could from the memory traces but gave him a picture that was too emotional and incomplete when examined in his own mind to make much sense. Hoping this time would be different, he headed for the master command chair and sat comfortably in it. The computer, sensing its duty, lowered the small probes, which he placed around his head, then administered the measured injections and began the master readout.