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.