Somebody did, but it was a while before I discovered how. About an hour after I had awakened a little bell clanged near the food port and I went over to it. Almost instantly a hot tray appeared, along with a thin plastic fork and knife I recognized as the dissolving type. They’d melt into a sticky puddle in an hour or less, then dry up into a powder shortly after that. Standard for prisoners.
The food was lousy, but I hadn’t expected better.
The vitamin-enriched fruit drink with it, though, was pretty good; I made the most of it, keeping the thin, clear container (not the dissolving type) in case I wanted water later. Everything else I put back in the port, and it vaporized neatly. All nice and sealed.
About the only thing they couldn’t control was bodily functions, and a half-hour or so after eating my first meal as a new man, you might say, nature called. On the far wall was a panel marked “toilet” and a small pull ring. Simple, standard stuff. I pulled the ring, the thing came down—and damned if there wasn’t a small, paper-thin probe in the recess behind it. And so I sat on the John, leaned back against the panel, and got brief and relief at the same time.
The thing worked by skin contact—don’t ask me how. I’m not one of the tech brains. It was not as good as a programming, but it enabled them to talk to me, even send me pictures that only I could see and hear.
“By now I hope you’re over the shock of discovering who and what you are,” Krega’s voice came to me, seemingly forming in my brain. I was shocked when I realized that not even my jailers could hear or see a thing.
“We have to brief you this way simply because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Oh, don’t worry about it—it’s permanent. But we prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock, and we haven’t the time to allow you to ‘set in’ completely, as it were. This method will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel you have the most difficult task of all four.”
I felt the excitement rise in me. The challenge, the challenge…
“Your objective world is Lilith, first of the Diamond colonies,” the commander’s voice continued. “Lilith is, scientifically speaking, a madhouse. There is simply no rational, scientific explanation for what you will find there. The only.thing that keeps all of us from going over the brink is that the place does have rules and is consistent within its own framework of logic. I will leave most of that to your orientation once you make planet fall. You will be met and briefed as a convict—along with the other inmates being sent there with you—by representatives of the Lord of Lilith, and that will be more effective than anything I can give you second-hand.
“Though the imprint ability of this device is limited,” he continued, “we can send you one basic thing that, oddly, you will not find on Lilith itself. It is a map of the entire place, as detailed as we could make it.”
I felt a sharp back pain followed by a wave of dizziness and nausea; this quickly cleared and I found that in fact I had a detailed physical-political map of the entirety of Lilith in my head. It would come in very handy.
There followed a stream of facts about the place not likely to be too detailed in any indoctrination lecture.-The planet was roughly 52,000 kilometers around at the equator or from pole to pole, allowing for topographic differences. Like all four of the Warden Diamond worlds, it was basically a ball—highly unusual as planets go, even though everybody including me thinks of all major planets as round.
The gravity was roughly .95 norm, so I’d feel lighter and be able to jump further. That would take a slight adjustment of timing, and I made a note to work on that first and foremost. It was also a hair higher than the norm for oxygen, which would make me feel a tad more energetic but also would make fires burn a little easier, quicker, and brighter. Not much, though. The higher concentration of water than normal combined with its 85-degree axial tilt and slightly under 192,000,000 kilometer distance from its sun—made this world mostly hot and very humid with minimal seasons. Latitude and elevation would be responsible for the main temperature variations on Lilith, not what month it was. Elevation loss was a near-standard 3 degrees centigrade per 1,800 meters.
And even latitude wasn’t all that much of a factor. Equatorial temperatures were scorchers—35 to 50 degrees centigrade, 25 to 34 or so in the mid-latitudes, and never less than 20 degrees even at the poles. No ice caps on Lilith. No ice, either, which in itself might explain why there was only one enormous continent on Lilith, along with a bunch of islands.
A day was 32.2 standard hours, so it would take some adjusting to the new time rate. A lot, I thought. That was over 8 hours more than I was used to. But I’d coped with almost as bad; I could cope with this one, too. A year was 344 Lilith days. So it was a large world, as worlds go, but with low gravity, which meant no metals to speak of. Pretty good prison, I thought.
“The Lord of Lilith is Marek Kreegan,” Krega continued. “Most certainly the most dangerous of the Four Lords, for he alone is not a criminal or convict but instead was, like you, an agent of the Confederacy, one of the best. Were he able to leave the Warden system, he would probably be considered the most dangerous man alive.”
I felt a thrill go through me for more than one reason. First, the absolute challenge of tracking down and hitting one like myself, one trained as I was and considered the most dangerous man alive—it was fantastic. But more than that, this information offered me two rays of hope that I’m fairly sure Krega hadn’t considered. If this man was a top agent sent down on a mission, he’d have been in the same position as I would be upon its completion—and he hadn’t been killed. There could be only one reason for that: they had no way of killing him. He’d figured the way out and taken it. Perfect. If Kreegan could do it, so could I.
And he’d worked himself up to being the Lord of Lilith.
The logic still held. If he and I were judged at least equal, then that meant that I potentially have the same powers as he has—greater powers than anyone else on the planet or somebody else would be Lord. And what he could do, I could do.
“Still, to find Kreegan, let alone kill him, could prove to be an almost impossible task,” Krega continued. “First of all, he rarely makes an appearance, and when he does, he is always concealed. Everyone who discovers what he looks like is killed. He has no fixed base, but roams the world, always in disguise. This keeps his underlings on their toes and relatively honest, at least toward him. They never know who he might be, but fear bun tremendously, as he can- kill them and they can do nothing to him. At last count there were a little over 13,244,000 people on Lilith—that’s a rough estimate, of course. A very small population, you’ll agree—but Kreegan can be any one of them.”
Well, actually he couldn’t, I noted to myself. For one thing, Kreegan was a standard from the civilized worlds. That meant he was within fairly definite physical limits, thus eliminating a lot of people. Of course, since I knew he was male that eliminated close to half the population right there. He was also seventy-seven, but he’d been on Lilith for twenty-one years, which would change him a great deal from any picture of him as a younger man. Still, he’d be an older man, and on Lilith older men would stand out anyway—it would be a rough world. So we call him middle-aged, standard height and build, and male.
When you were starting with 13,000,000, that narrowed the field down more than, I suspect, Krega himself realized.
A challenge, yes, but not as impossible as it i sounded. Even more important, as the Lord and administrator there would be certain places he’d have to hit, and certain functions he’d have to attend. Still, more narrowing down, and I wasn’t even on the planet yet.