“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
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?