Lilith: A Snake in the Grass

Chapter Twenty-Two First Lord of the Diamond

The extent of the carnage was enormous. The massacre of the witches had been most thorough, more gruesome than any autopsy.

It took over two hours to reach the Castle, and by that time even the mop-up had been completed. Yellow and red forces were methodically surveying the field, helping those who could be helped, cleaning up the debris. It would be a long, tough job.

As I expected, Father Bronz and a number of others were sitting in wicker chairs outside the Castle’s gates, relaxing, eating, and drinking. I recognized Vola and her sister, Dola, Boss Rognival and the Ladies Tona and Kysil, and Master Artur. The others were not familiar to me but wore designs indicating they were of Zeis. One of them—a small, frail-looking man, bald and wizened—was dressed as elaborately in ornate silken tunic, heavy boots; he wore atop his head a tiara with a single large blue gem similar to, but not identical to, the one Rognival wore. Another man, dressed in a manner similar to the older, thin one but wearing mostly gold colors, as well as a wide-brimmed hat, relaxed nearby. He was an older man, with neatly trimmed gray beard, certainly once of the civilized worlds. Although he was many years my senior he looked to be in nearly perfect physical condition. •

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.”

“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.”

“Oh, I’ve been Father Bronz for ten years,” he told us. “It’s the easiest way to get around inconspicuously.” He paused. “Of course I’ll have to undergo some physical changes now and find a new persona.” He sighed. “Too bad, too. Old Father Bronz really did some good. I’ve been considering asking for some real clergy here.”

I let the topic go and finally asked him the most important question. “What about me?” I asked. “What happens now?”

“You’ll do fine,” he assured me. “Stay here as a Master for a while and get some experience, then either outlive the Boss, here, or go find yourself a weak Knight and start it all. You’re going to be at least a Duke someday, maybe even Lord. I told you. It took me seventeen years.”

“I’ll beat your record,” I told him, not at all jokingly.

He stared at me hard. “I think you might at that.”

Dinner broke up soon after that, with Kreegan saying that he was catching the shuttle when it put down the next day. “Business,” he told us. “Four Lords business.”

And Boss Tiel, to my surprise, had a few words for me as well. “I’d like you to stay here,” he told me sincerely. “I’m an old man now, Tremon. You could take me out right now, as you originally planned. But a number of the Masters, Artur in particular, are strong, and you might take me out only to find yourself losing, on experience alone, to somebody else. Maybe even Rognival, who’d love to swap that island for Zeis. A couple of years here, though, learning technique and the full use of your power, making contacts, doing the proper politics, and you’ll have the knighthood by acclamation. You’re the best qualified. Artur’s a great soldier but a lousy administrator. The others are pretty much the same. No talent or no ambition. It’s up to you, of course, but you’ve impressed me.”

I told him I’d think about it, but I knew the answer. I would stay, of course, because that was the path to my own ambition most open to me and because of Ti. She’d never like or forgive many of these people, but as she said, she was a part of Zeis.

Finally, I sought out Dr. Pohn. I still didn’t like the little son of a bitch, and I knew that he’d be one of the first to go in the Tremon regime that was coming. Still, now I needed him.

The next afternoon he would undertake a little Warden-style operation. Okay, my twin and counterpart up there somewhere—I failed miserably. I got played for a sucker. I learned nothing about your precious aliens, and Lord Marek Kreegan, curse his black soul, remains Lord of Lilith and First Lord of the Diamond. But that’s it. I’ve done all I can do for now and I find myself less and less anxious to do you any more favors. Up yours, Confederacy! Maybe when I become Lord of Lilith I won’t like those aliens; but then again, maybe I will. But whether or not I feed you. any information will be based on my own assessment at the time, from the viewpoint of my own interests. Cal Tremon, none too respectfully, resigns.