Lilith: A Snake in the Grass

Chapter Eleven Choosing a Different Road

Master Artur was prompt and didn’t seem the least put-out. He was just as cold and mean as always, with no trace of anything more or less. I began to wonder if the man were human.

For the next hour or so we went on a tour of the Castle, armed with a nicely drawn map that Artur handed to me. The place was very logically laid out more or less in a D shape, with corridors fanning out in all directions to main function halls and rooms, each of which were also connected in the rear semicircle by service passages. Along each corridor were living quarters, storage, and other necessities, including group bathrooms. The corridors were arranged somewhat on a caste basis, with the bulk of them devoted to the Supervisor class that did the real work 01 the place, then the two on either side of the central passage for Master rank, and the center of course leading to Sir Tiel’s luxurious quarters and those of his immediate family.

Not shown on the map, I noticed, were the inevitable secret passages between rooms and those perhaps above and below as well, such as the one from which they spied on me. Their absence didn’t surprise me, but I decided that I really wanted to know more about them.

Outside the Castle Artur’s pride and joy was quartered in a large compound against the side of the hills. It was almost a stockade, made of great logs with catwalks and guard towers that reminded me of some primitive fortress. Artur had been totally cold, dry, and formal during our tour and seemed distant from everything and everybody, but now he seemed to warm and those chilly eyes lit up.

“Not a part of the regular tour,” he told me, “but I have to go down and check them out anyway, so you might as well come along.”

“Them” turned out to be enclosed herds of great insects the likes of which I had not really seen before on Lilith or anywhere else. Trained Supervisor-grade personnel scurried about when Artur approached, so by the time we entered the huge compound they were all set and waiting for him. Lines of them, rows and rows of them, in tight quarters but nonetheless mighty impressive.

They sat there in formation, huge wuks, as they were called, their bodies a bright green with a whitish underbelly; they were fully three or four meters long on six thick, powerful bent legs, their heads dominated by great luminous ovoid eyes flanking a curled, whip like proboscis that concealed a nasty, beaklike mouth. Their skins were perfectly smooth, but I got the impression of a strong skeleton just beneath that made them far less fragile than they looked.

Each had a saddle tied to it between the first and second pair of legs; it was an elaborate seat with a hard back and an X-shaped restraint to cover their riders and hold them in. The riders, in black pants and boots, were both male and female, but all looked tough, hard, and well-disciplined. There was an array of what I could only guess were weapons, from pikes and staffs to what might very well have been blow-guns. They were situated-so that the restrained rider could get at them easily and quickly.

“I am impressed,” I told Artur (and-1 wasn’t kidding). “But this looks like an army to me—mounted cavalry. I wouldn’t think you’d need an army here.” Artur chuckled. “Oh, yes, indeed we do,” he responded. “You see, basically in order to move up in this society you have to kill somebody—be stronger than they were. Now, you tell me—it you were Sir Tiel, would you keep going day after day in challenges against everybody who thinks he can knock you off? Of course not And neither do any of the other knights. And what do you get for it? A lot of bowing and scraping, of course, but mostly a shitload of administrative headaches. There are probably hundreds of masters stronger than most of the knights, maybe even stronger than the Duke himself, but they just don’t want the job. A lot do, though. So I’m charged with seeing that it’s a bit more difficult to challenge the Knight of the Keep—a policeman, you might say. And if one knight wants something another knight has, well, they can challenge knight to knight —but they’d probably end up either dead or in a draw, so there’s no profit in it. So we fight a little. Anybody who wants anything from this Keep has to either bargain for it in a nice way or fight for it—and that’s where these troops come in.”

I nodded, my view of Lilith changing a bit once more. At first I couldn’t see why they’d have fighting on a local scale, but then I realized that it was the safety valve, you might say. These squabbles tended to keep the most dangerous of people on Lilith—the psychopaths, war-lovers, violence-prone troublemakers, that sort—occupied. If they liked to beat one another’s brains in, give them a forum for doing so, an outlet for their violence that didn’t mess up the nice, neat system. I could see an astute administrator, particularly one with a lot of troublesome, violence-prone people, actually starting a war with a neighbor now and again just to relieve the tension—and perhaps the boredom.

“The wuks,” Artur was saying, “use those big hind legs of theirs to leap high into the ah- it they want to, with the soldier aboard. That’s why the people are strapped hi, hut have their arms free. They can jump behind static ground lines with ease, making fixed fortifications useless. Up on the hill, there—you can see all those holes, almost like a honeycomb—are my besils, swift flyers that are, so to speak, my air force. Combine them with ground troops and you have a force that, properly employed, is almost invincible.” He said that last not in a bragging tone but with the ring of truth and conviction about it. The key phrase was “properly employed.” I had no doubt that Artur was one hell of a good field general.

A neat system, I had to admit. The knights, fat and comfortable, didn’t want to challenge each other. The lack of any kind of instant communication meant that the acquisition of large areas, the consolidation of Keeps under one rule, would be difficult and profitless to maintain. And any challenger to the knight would first have to get past the Castle and its defenses—no mean feat. No matter what power anybody had, an arrow or spear would still kill him if it landed properly —would kill even Marek Kreegan himself.

I could just see knights sitting around at parties given by one or another of them making bets on whose army was best, whose commander was most skilful. I was willing to bet that Artur had won a lot of those wagers.

We walked back to the Castle after Artur’s formal inspection. Off in the distance I could see the pawns, countless numbers of them, working in the fields and tending the herds. Only then did I think of them on an emotional level. I had been out there only a day before, yet already the social gulf separating us was an almost solid, unpenetrable barrier. There seemed something wrong about that and something profound, as well, that said a lot about the ruling classes and the ruled; but I couldn’t put my finger on it Still, I was closer to them than to people like Artur and Pohn. But I was no match for the lowest, stupidest supervisor stablehand in the place.

We went to the supervisors’ dining hall, and I suddenly realized how hungry I was. It had been many hours since that light breakfast, and even though I’d done little to work anything off, I was used to a lot more bulk.

“I will leave you here,” Artur told me. “For the next few days, you have die run of the Castle. Relax, talk to people, learn the system. When we’re ready, you’ll start classes to see how your power can be developed.” His furry brows narrowed a little and he looked at me hard. “Don’t get too cocksure in those classes, boy. Remember, it’s not just a test of power and will but an intelligence test, too. Remember where Kronlon wound up.” And with that he was gone.

I was dimly aware that I had been given a kindness by this strange, aristocratic man. I pondered his words as I ate heartily the best meal I’d had in months, and I think I understood what he was saying.

They wanted you to develop what powers you had, of course, the better to fit into the system and serve the bosses. But suppose you did too well. If you proved out stronger than a Master, say, would your host and boss suffer you to live? Not likely. But it wouldn’t do to slack, either—or you would wind up out in the muck with the pawns. Tricky indeed, this social system.

I spent the next couple of days making friends with some of the Castle staff, exploring the Castle and its many byways and learning what I could about the passages, somewhat euphemistically referred to as “service corridors,” not shown on the maps. From casual friendships I learned several things I had to know, not the least of which was that the party held the night I’d arrived on the scene was in honor of Marek Kreegan himself, in on one of his surprise tours. Nobody had seen him—not even those who served at the fete could say what the Lord of Lilith looked like. I had the strong impression that not even the man who owned the place knew which of his guests was Kreegan, whose powers to cloud minds was legendary and whose passion for anonymity was absolute. Duke Kosaru was the nominal guest of honor, but they all knew that Kreegan had been there.

Was he still here? I couldn’t help but wonder and looked suspiciously at all those of Master class I came in contact with who were not obviously of Zeis Keep.

I also dropped in on Medical from time to time, mostly to see what, if anything, was to happen to those girls on the slabs, particularly Ti. I could hardly understand my fixation with her; in the past I’d always been coldly detached toward sexual partners and even friends. Most were shallow individuals anyway, and those who weren’t were a danger to me of one sort or another, as I might have been set after one or another of the exceptional ones at some point. That worried me, really, since I always had such a clear idea of who I was, what I wanted, and what my place in the universe was.

Cal Tremon, what was your body making me into? Was I in fact no longer immune from the emotional factors I always believed had set me apart from the rest of humanity?

Most of my attempts to see Pohn failed. He was a busy man, it seemed, and hard to catch in any one spot. A doctor on a world where nobody got sick and where almost all injuries healed themselves perfectly or regenerated what was missing had a lot of time for research, and I knew some of the directions that research was taking. I did learn from his assistants that he was responsible for the super creatures of Artur’s force, selective breeding and genetic manipulation by sheer force of will alone accomplishing wonders. Anybody that godlike could hardly resist doing the same to people.

I did catch him in one afternoon, though, and he was happy to see me. Apparently I was one of the few who seemed truly interested in his work, but I realized I was treading on eggshells around him. In his own way he was at least as dangerous as Artur, if only because his powers were more far-reaching and far more subtle.

Finally, though, we were again in that eerie, funereal room with the twelve comatose girls. I saw that Ti was still among them.

“How do they eat?” I asked him. “How do you keep them from developing circulatory problems, all the troubles inherent in not moving? For that matter, how do they go to the bathroom?”

He chuckled. “It’s a matter of routine,” he explained. “I and my assistants handle each of them at four-hour intervals. It’s quite simple. Watch.” With that he went over to the nearest unconscious girl, made a cursory examination of her, then stepped back a little.

“Kira, sit up,” he coaxed more than ordered. The girl, still dead to the world, eyes closed and breathing regularly, sat up. It was a ghoulish sight, as if a corpse had suddenly reanimated itself without ever really coming to life.

“Open your eyes, Kira,” he instructed, still using a gentle tone, and she did; but it was clear there was no thought behind the large, pretty brown eyes revealed there.

“Get out of bed and stand next to it, Kira,” Pohn instructed, and again, with a smooth, fluid motion and no wasted moves, she did as she was told. I, who had killed without thinking about it more than once and had seen a lot of horrors in my life, shivered slightly.

“She’s like a machine, an android,” I said.

Pohn nodded. “Yes, yes, that’s pretty much it,” he agreed. “But an android is as complex as the human body. Here, with techniques like these, I will one day learn the secret of the Warden organism. With subjects like these I have already gone further than I dared hope when I started.”

“Are they—aware—of what is happening?” I asked him.

“Oh, no, no, no,” he assured me. “That would be far too cruel. With a lot of experimentation I have determined the location of what I. might call the key neural connectors, although that’s a layman’s simplification. Their thinking part remains as if in the deepest sleep, while the rest, their physical part, can be awakened and stimulated—I call it external motivation—to do things their conscious minds could not. Here, I’ll show you. Kira, follow me one step behind me, stopping when I stop and walking when I walk.”

The girl followed him out the door like a shadow, and I followed them. We wound up in a small lab whose walls were the solid natural bedrock of the mountain itself, rough and unfinished. He positioned her at least three meters from one of these blank, rocky walls.

“During that key puberty period, Kira was able to influence the growth of plants—they grew almost as you watched—and she actually made small earthquakes in her local vicinity. Then the power passed, as it does in all but a few, and I wound up with her here. Working with her, I’ve been able to discover a large number of chemical stimuli to certain areas of the brain. She supplies the power and the stimuli, I supply the willpower.” He looked around the barren room. “Do you sense the Warden organism here?”

It had become almost second nature to sense that odd feeling of life all around, even in the most passive and inanimate of tilings. I felt it, of course, in every molecule of the rock that framed the room, and nodded to him.

“Good. Now watch. Kira, about two meters up on the far wall I want you to hollow out a fifty-centimeter cube from the rock with your mind.” He stood back, and for some reason I shrank back as far as I could.

I was aware that Pohn was concentrating on her, more than likely triggering those stimuli, those enzymes or whatever that built up the power.

“Now, Kira,” he breathed.

What happened was almost anticlimactic. No crackle of lightning, no rumblings or anything like that. It was just that… well…

I heard a click and then a sound like falling plaster or dirt dislodged over the side of a precipice. Just a little sound—but there was now a cube of roughly fifty centimeters cut into the wall, with a heap of fine powder inside.

Dr. Pohn went over and brushed the powder out and gestured for me to approach. I was a little nervous I about getting in the way of that kind of power, but I I did examine the hollow the girl had created at Pohn’s direction. It was perfectly smooth, very regular, with no sign of how it had been formed.

“Just proof that the potential is in all of us,” he told me. “More, I think, in women than in men for some reason. At least the women seem stronger in there powers, although more erratic. I have girls in there who could possibly reduce this castle to dust if properly stimulated and motivated.”

“It would seem to me that the Boss and his superiors might find you something of a threat, Doctor,” I noted.

He laughed and shook his head from side to side. “Oh, no. I’m quite strong, quite powerful, but I have no taste for knighthood. It would end my work, really., I’m no risk because they all know of my lack of ambition with regard to their jobs. In fact, they encourage my work because it might help them. Master Artur, for example, is quite interested in one of the girls, who, we think, might well be able to freeze an attacking army, perhaps even dissolve it.”

We walked back to the “morgue” as we talked, the zombie like Kira following obediently.

“Which one?” I asked, feeling a little queasy.

“That one,” he replied, pointing, as I suspected, directly at Ti.

I was becoming pretty good at locating the secret passages. Oh, I’ll admit I didn’t try the ones they’d guard and booby-trap, the ones leading to Sir Tiel’s quarters, but the rest were more than handy. You could almost live inside the small passages and corridors in the walls, although you’d have trouble avoiding the others who used them regularly—some on business (such as spying) and some just for fun, such as voyeurism. Everybody knew about them, of course, but few really thought much about them.

My lessons started about a week after I arrived at the Castle, and they were what I was most interested in. My tutor was Vola Tighe, sister of the elderly matron who’d admitted me in the first place. Unlike her sister, though, Vola was far more serious and businesslike and seemed to have a better idea of herself and her duties. Still, outwardly they might have been twins and may well have been.

“The key is chemical stimuli, as you know,” she told me. “The trick is to be enough in control of yourself that you can reach inside your own head and trigger exactly what you need when you want it, then direct the result by force of will. Everyone on Lilith has this potential, but it is psychology that makes the difference. Not everyone on Lilith—not most, thank heavens—possesses the concentration, willpower, sheer intelligence to learn and execute the techniques properly.”

“Dr. Pohn thinks otherwise,” I pointed out. “He thinks we’re born with different levels of stimuli and most of us can only do so much.”

“That pervert,” she responded in disgust. “He was a quack even back on the frontier. He’s just a sadist with a fondness for poor little girls, and don’t you forget it. The Boss indulges him—partly because he fears him, I think, but mostly because Pohn feeds him the scientific nonsense to back up what Sir Tiel wants to hear. I think it’s- simply disgusting what he does up there to those poor little girls; it’s very much like what he got caught doing that caused him to be sent here in the first place. But as long as he restricts himself to pawns, he’s safe.”

As long as he restricts himself to pawns… I thought back at my own condemnation of the villagers, my almost identical feelings, and really couldn’t see what was wrong with the logic. And yet somewhere there had to be a flaw, for the wrongness of this casual attitude toward the majority of Lilith’s population nagged at me. On the civilized worlds it was different, I told myself. There the majority was Homo superior, perfect in mind and body, sharing equally in the work and in the good life, the Utopian dream realized. There the inferiors were cast out to the frontier, or ferreted out and eliminated by ones like me and killed or…

Or sent to the Warden Diamond.

If Vola was right and Pohn wrong, though, I told myself, it meant that the potential to turn this class-infested tyranny into a true paradise was possible, and perhaps the result most to be wished. The parallels with human history generally seemed to apply here. Those with the power had always enslaved the masses and gathered the wealth for their own ends until finally the masses rose up against the unfairness and the revolution came, casting the tyrants out. With human civilization, the enormous explosion of technology had put most manual labor into the history books and a master computer in everyone’s pocket. Control of technology had been the key to human advances; control of the Warden power here would be the equivalent. If everyone on Lilith could be taught the power, then the Dr. Pohn’s of this world would quickly be eradicated. I realized then that Vola didn’t understand this extension of her own logic, didn’t follow the implications to their ultimate conclusions, but I knew now what sort of cause I might devote my life to after… what?

After I became Lord of Lilith.

I turned back to my lessons.

Most of the preliminaries were basic stuff, a lot of esoteric biology, a lot of Warden history, that sort of thing. Most of it I knew, and some of the mental conditioning exercises were pretty similar to those I underwent in training as an agent. It was absurdly easy —and obviously only preparatory to the real thing. What I lacked for the first few days was the key, the catalyst. I could already regulate a lot of my autonomic functions—heartbeat, respiration—and could deaden pain centers, that sort of thing. It took a little adjustment with a new body, but once you knew how, it was easy to reassume control. But these people weren’t mental marvels or miracle workers; there was an edge they had and I needed it.

I had made such progress, though, that by the fourth day Vola decided I was ready. She entered my study cell with a small gourd brazier and ignited a fire under it. From a small skia pouch on her hip, she poured a transparent golden liquid into the gourd and allowed it to boil. The vapors alone were pretty odd and made me feel somewhat light-headed.

Satisfied that it was right, she turned to me. “This is a drug,” she explained needlessly. “It is distilled from a somewhat poisonous plant, the hudah, found in the wild. The early science team that was stranded here started experimenting with all the wildlife, for they realized they had to understand their environment in order to live in it. This particular mixture provides the best catalyst they found for the Warden organism, causing a permanent change in you over a period of time^-several dozen administrations, at least. The carefully measured dosage, given at exacting intervals, changes a key element within your cellular structure, giving a message, as it were, to the Warden organisms inside to direct a slightly different enzyme balance. Drink it down, completely if you can; if it is too hot for you, let it cool slightly. The heat simply aids absorption into your bloodstream.”

I nodded and told her I understood. Inwardly I was elated. This was the edge, the key to real power. I drank the steaming liquid eagerly, burning my tongue slightly as I did so, but I didn’t mind. It tasted bitter and nasty, but I’d expected it to be even worse. The potion made sense, in a way. It was a natural product of Lilith, it contained Warden organisms in its own molecules, and it was the natural complement to what I’d been told about how this all worked.

The only question I had, one not likely to find an easy answer, was how the hell anybody had ever come up with it. You could ask that about most great discoveries, though, I admit. Accident, probably.

The stuff burned inside me, but I felt no immediate effects. I looked at Vola. “If this is truly a chemical key, then why won’t it work for everybody? Why wouldn’t it work for the pawns?”

She smiled a little patronizingly. “It has only slight, random, and usually destructive effects on pawns. We have found that you have to have reached a state of power without its aid before it will work. Your action with the unfortunate supervisor prepared the way, made your brain willing to accept what is now being done. You see, this is the next test. Anyone not of the power will die from the poison.”

I coughed a little and looked at her in surprise. “Now is a fine time to tell me that!”

“Sit back and relax,” she instructed, an undertone of amusement in her voice. “Let it take control.”

I could feel the potion start to work now, causing an odd, slightly hallucinogenic effect. The dimensions of the room seemed to be wrong, for one thing, and Vola herself, even the little brazier she was now putting away, seemed slightly fuzzy, distorted. I felt slightly flushed, as if I had a mild fever, and I realized I was sweating heavily.

Vola came over, put her hand on my face, turning it slightly, then examined my eyes. She nodded to herself, then stepped back. “Now,” she said, her voice sounding hollow and like an echo in my ears, “let’s see how strong you really are.”

The distorting effect seemed to pass rather quickly, to be replaced with a different sense that might be equally false. Suddenly everything seemed sharper, more detailed and focused, than I could ever remember in my life. I had been slightly sighted, it appeared, and now I could fully see.

I saw more than room and its human and inanimate contents; I also saw the Warden organism. Saw it and heard it, sort of, but in a way I’d never known before. For the first time I realized how Dr. Pohn could literally see into cells, or the-physicist into the very molecules. The whole universe seemed open to me, big and small, depending on the focus of my will, and I could see any part of it no matter how tiny. It was a heady, godlike feeling like nothing any human off Lilith could possibly imagine. And I kept thinking, this is no drug-induced hallucination, no distortion oj the senses—this is for real!

More important than sensing the Warden organism in other things, I was equally if not more aware of it within myself. The incredibly minute living things were within me, were one with me, part of me. I reached out and touched them and felt them return that mental touch, felt a sense of pleasure and excitement within those tiny creatures at the recognition of their existence. And yet the Wardens within me were also part of a larger organism, the organism that was everything on this crazy planet, all linked, all one, in communication as the cells of the body are in communication with their parts and with the cells around them.

“Now you see how it feels,” I heard Vola’s voice as if from some distant place. “Now you know the truth of the power. Now you can use it, shape it, bend it to your will and your direction.”

I turned and looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. Kronlon had acquired a shine, an intangible brightness you more felt than saw, when he’d mustered his limited powers against me. Vola, too, shone, but her light was so much more intense than Kronlon’s that it made him seem less than a pawn, less than a tree or blade of grass. It was not a physical shining; another observer would have seen nothing. It was instead an inner burning sensed by the tiny microorganisms within my very cells and related to me.

She pointed, a radiant, supernatural being, at a small wicker-type chair in a corner of the cell, and I followed her arm to focus upon it.

“Look not at the chair,” she instructed, “but within it. Make contact with the host within?’

Doing so was absurdly easy, requiring no thought at all. I just looked and lo! I knew that chair, was one with that chair, saw how it was made and how its very molecules were bound together.

“Order the chair to decompose, but do not kill that which is within,” Vola ordered. “Release it to become again what it was.”

I frowned for a moment, trying to understand exactly what she was saying. Then suddenly, I saw the whole pattern in her meaning. The chair was alive, bound together as an organism, by someone’s commands, the Warden organism there going against its nature to hold itself in that pattern and remain a chair. The geometry of the pattern was clear to me, and it was hardly a gesture to release it, to snap the pattern and allow the organism within to redirect the cells of the chair—somehow still living, although long separated from its parent plants—to their normal state.

The chair decomposed rapidly, but did not come apart. As old patterns were dissolved, new patterns were woven, patterns that were instinctive to the tiny things within it. The visible effect was as if the chair had dissolved into dust, then swirled around, the tiny dust particles coming together in a new series of shapes that were somehow right.

Where the chair had stood were now the stalks of seven plants, the parent plants from which the reeds that had made up the chair had been cut. They were living plants, and they were drawing from the stone floor beneath them to gain what was necessary to sustain themselves.

“Now,” Vola breathed, sounding slightly impressed, “put the chair back together again.”

That stopped me cold. Hell, that pattern was so complex it was almost unbelievable. I could undo it, of course, but to put it back—that was something else again.

Damned killjoy, I thought sourly. Until now it was so much fun to be a god.

“The next lesson,” she told me. “Power without knowledge or skill is always destructive. You can unmake with ease, but it takes a lot of study to build instead of destroy.”

“But how?” I cried in frustration. “How can I know how to build, to create?”

She laughed. “Could you have physically made that chair?” she asked me. “Could you have taken an axe, cut the right stalks to the right lengths, then bound them together physically to make such a thing?”

I thought about it. Could I? “No,” I had to respond. “I’m not a carpenter.”

“And that is the way of Lilith, as elsewhere,” she told me. “To use the power well in a specialized area is important but requires memorizing the proper patterns and then some practice. But we have an advantage here that those who do not have the power lack,” she went on, and I was aware she went to the door, stepped out, then came back in with an identical chair, placing it near the plant stalks in the corner. She stepped back.

“Look at the chair,” she ordered. “Be one with it. Know its pattern.”

I did, and it was far easier than last time now that I knew just what to look for.

“Now, using the chair as a model, put the other chair back together,” she instructed.

I frowned. Having just been pulled down to earth from godhood, I was now being ordered to elevate myself again.

“Is that possible?” I managed.

“It is if you are powerful enough,” she responded. “Supervisors can destroy and, to a limited extent, stabilize things they make. You have already shown yourself a Supervisor. But the supervisor, like the pawn, must build or physically make everything himself. A Master may do more. A Master may take the very elements that make something up and rearrange them to suit himself. Are you a Master, Cal Tremon? Can you be a Master?”

She was pushing, I realized, and I hesitated within myself before going further. We were beyond this lesson, I suspected, beyond whatever we were supposed to prove. Had I in fact done what Artur cautioned against—done what I was supposed to do too effortlessly, too well? Should I make this attempt she demanded of me?

The hell with it, I told myself. Let’s see just what I’m made of, whether the computer that selected me as the best person for the job knew its stuff. If I had the potential to be a Master, and I’d better, I wanted to know it. I’d spent too long marking time in the mud and the muck and I was impatient.

I stared at the chair again, saw its pattern, how it was bound up and tied together. Now I looked at the strange tubular plants growing where the other chair had been, and I again linked-with the Warden organism within them while trying not to lose the contact and, well, communion, with the chair. It was a tricky juggling act, since the molecular structure was the same for both and it was hard not to confuse them.

I ordered the Wardens in the plants to disunite once again, to break down as they had before, untying their current plant pattern. Keeping a mostly mental eye on them, I concentrated hard on the existing chair, the pattern, the way it was bound up and tied together.

There were a lot of false starts, a lot of confusion; at one point I almost had the chair dissolving instead of the plants recombining. I don’t know how long it took, but finally I succeeded. Two chairs stood there side by side, looking like twins from the same mass-produced, computer-controlled factory. I was sweating like mad and my head throbbed, but I had done it. Totally exhausted, I sank to the floor and gasped for breath. Vola, however, was more than pleased.

“I didn’t think I could do it,” I admitted, breathing as hard as if I had been lifting heavy stones.

“You are strong indeed, Cal Tremon,” she responded. “Very strong. Many of my past students have risen to be Masters, but only four have ever accomplished that exercise on one dosage. Most never are able to do it, and they remain supervisors. Many, like your Kronlon, could not even decompose the chair without killing the organisms within. Others, the bulk of them, manage that much—and no more. A very few can do the reassembly, but only four before —now five—have done it on the first try. It will become easier now each time you do it, although the pattern for such a chair is simple compared to most other things.”

“The other four,” I pressed, feeling completely washed out. “Anybody I know?”

She shrugged. “My nephew, Boss Tiel, for one,” she replied. “Also Dr. Pohn and Master Artur. And Marek Kreegan.”

My head came up. “What? You taught him?”

She nodded. “Long ago, of course. I was very young then, no more than sixteen or seventeen, but I was here, as I have always been. I am one of the rare ones, Tremon—a native of considerable power.”

That was interesting, but the information about Kreegan was more so. This explained why he returned here off and on and why he might permit a party in his honor here, of all places. Decades ago Kreegan, too, had been landed right here in Zeis Keep, had worked in those same fields, had been brought to the Castle—if there was a Castle in those days—and had been trained by a very young Vola. There was too much going on here for it to be chance. The Confederacy had arranged this, of course. Picked the man who most matched Kreegan’s old agent profile and sent him to the same places under the same conditions. I could see their thinking clearly now, and I had to admit there was nothing wrong with it.

“I’ll bet you made the chair the first time,” I said.

She grinned and winked at me.

“Tell me about Kreegan,” I pressed. “What’s he like?”

She stood up and stood back a moment, studying me. “A lot like you, Cal Tremon. An awful lot like you.” But she would say no more, leaving me to recover from my increasingly nasty headache as the effects of the drug wore off. Power was not without its price.