Chthon (26 page)

“Your supply ran out?” Aton was not wholly pleased with any part of this strange situation.

“No.” She would not say more, but instead led him to the door. He obeyed her gesture.

Night was falling, and the floating clouds were carded across the dim horizon, embers in the sky. He had never seen his home more beautiful.

“O joy!” he thought, “that in our—”

“You must go to him,” she said, her voice urgent. “You have to do battle tonight, while there is time. Please go.”

Aton stared, absently noting her lovely pallor. “Do battle? Why? I don’t know anything about this, this ‘Evil one.’ What’s the hurry? Why won’t you explain?”

“Please,” she said, and there were tiny tears on her cheeks.

“Let me touch my hvee,” he said, bargaining for time to comprehend the mystery. Coquina stood still, a frozen doll, while he lifted the little plant from her hair: the token of love that he would reclaim permanently when they married. She loved him, strange as her actions might be; the hvee attested to that. Now she was acting as inexplicably as had the minionette, so long ago at the spotel. Were her reasons as valid?

In his cupped hands, the hvee withered and died.

“The hour of the waning of love has beset us,” he thought, astounded. But lost
LOE
was no comfort now.

Whom the hvee cannot love—

He stared at the limp green strand. It had condemned him as unfit to be loved, and there could be no appeal. Had all his aspirations come to no more than this?

The clouds were dull and gray in the fading light: ashes in the sky.

Seventeen

Cold Coquina had not told him where to find the evil foe, but Aton strode over the fields in a familiar and purposeful direction. Three miles into the dusk he came across the black silhouette: the ship from Chthon.

For almost a year this man had waited for him, not as an arm of the law, but as the emissary of a god. Coquina’s vigor had repulsed him. She had not been bluffing when she had spoken—so long ago, when love was rising—of her ability to subdue aggressive men. But she had not been able to defeat the power of Chthon which backed this man. That was for Aton himself to do.

He did not mean to return to prison on any basis.

The lock was open. Foolish man, to forget your defenses! Aton found the inset rungs and climbed.

His head came level with the port, reminding him of a prior climb and a prior hope. Something pricked his nose. He held himself rigid while his eyes probed the shadows.

It was a tiny, thin-bladed knife, held with a surgeon’s precision. The squatting figure’s slightly luminescent eyes bore intently on him, and Aton knew that the potent contact lenses rendered the gloom—vincible. The lips below were pursed in a silent whistle, part of a tuneless distraction. “Hello, Partner,” he said.

“Partners we shall be,” the man replied. “But not as we have been. You know me now.” The knife did not waver.

“Yes,” Aton said, bracing his legs more comfortably beneath him. “The minion of Chthon, come to take me back. It was no coincidence that brought you to the hinterland of Idyllia, Chthon-planet, to find me and shepherd me through discoveries that betrayed my fitness for your master. How well it has been said: no one escapes.”

“No one,” the man agreed, unimpressed by Aton’s rhetoric. The blade did not retreat.

Aton knew better than to back down, either verbally or physically. If he had not been obsessed with other matters, he would have seen through Partner’s façade long ago. The man had been too patient, giving him time on Earth, on Minion, on Hvee, fading into the background while Aton explored his own nature. Partner had not been interested in garnets or the mines from which they came; that had been a convenient pretext to lull suspicion. Partner already had the key to the mines, to all of Chthon.

Aton paused before making his next statement, not certain whether it would cause the knife to withdraw or to slice forward. He plunged. “No coincidence. Indeed, we are very much alike—Doc Bedside!”

The blade disappeared. “Come in,” Doc said.

Aton clambered into the chamber. The tight residential compartment was much as he remembered it from their several journeys together: water and food-supply vents along one short wall, descending bunks along the other. This was a sport ship, intended for wilderness camping and/or private parties. The space that should ordinarily have been allocated to cargo was retained simply as space. The floor area was a generous eight feet square.

Bedside gestured, and soft green light radiated from the walls: the light of the caverns of Chthon. Aton made no comment. ‘Partner’ had suffered through conventional illumination, to conceal his identity, but now the mask was off. What was the real connection between this man and Chthon, and why had he chosen to hide his history before?

“What is ‘Myxo’?” Aton asked him.

“Mucus. That wasn’t obvious?”

“Not at the time,” Aton said, thinking of Chthon and the horrors therein. The Hard Trek had saved its worst until last. What sort of man could like it well enough to post academic riddles for those who might follow? “Do you know how many died, trying to make the escape? How did you manage it, alone?”

Bedside settled back against the wall, squatting as though he were in the bare caverns he evidently longed for. His scalpel was out of sight, but ready, Aton was certain. No careless man survived the perils of the trek. No normal man. No sane man.

“Insanity, of course, is a legal fiction these days,” Bedside said, choosing to tackle the implied question first. “Biopsychic techniques have eradicated the problem, officially. Just as other medicine has conquered physical illness, with a chilling exception or two.” Aton could not miss the ironic reference to the worst illness of all, the chill. “Nevertheless, it becomes necessary for society to incarcerate certain, ah, nonconformists. When I found myself in Chthon as a prisoner, my—oh, let’s call it my escape complex—my escape complex was activated. I had purpose. In that circumstance I became in effect sane. Do you follow me?”

“No.”

Bedside frowned. “A man who is adjusted to an abnormal situation, while living in a ‘normal’ society, has a tendency toward nonsurvival. But place that man in a situation conforming to his particular bias, and his traits become those necessary
for
survival, while the normal man perishes. This is the reason it is said that no sane man may escape from Chthon. Chthon is not oriented toward sanity. Of course, the odds against a compatible juxtaposition of anamorphoses—”

Aton was shaking his head. He was not paying much attention to the words; he knew that this was only a conversational prelude to the desperate contest to come. He was confronted with as deadly a foe, here, as he had ever met in his life—one that he had to kill. On this battle hinged his future, though the issues were devious. A loss would mean a return to Chthon and neo-sanity; victory, a return to the blasted prospects of a dead hvee.

Perhaps, after all, he was only fighting to preserve his right to blot himself in suicide.

“Put a fish in water and it swims,” Bedside rapped. “Put that fish on land—”

Aton nodded, not wishing to carry the subject farther.

“Chthon was my element,” Bedside continued remorselessly. “I made my way out. I swam. The monsters there were as nothing to the monsters in my mind. But once I returned to society, I found myself drowning in air, as I had drowned before. My aberration quickly signaled my position, and I was arrested again. They could not ship me to Chthon a second time, because they thought I might lead the entire complement out. They could neither ignore me nor let me go. They preferred to apply a little medicinal insanity to their own intellects, and assume that there
was
no escape from Chthon, and that I was therefore merely a demented creature who identified with the notorious Dr. Bedecker. All of which was true enough, in its way.

“At any rate, they put me in a ‘hospital’ for ‘observation.’ This imprisonment reactivated my escape syndrome, and I was able to function effectively again. Their walls and guards were child’s play, after the Hard Trek.”

Aton watched him cynically. “If you knew that freedom would cost you your sanity, why did you strive for it?”

Bedside smiled with his teeth. “Another romantic lunacy. We assume that a personality problem can be liquidated merely through an understanding of it—as though a man could lift a mountain once he admitted it was heavy. No: recognition is not synonymous with solution. I fly toward freedom as a moth toward the candle, and nothing so insubstantial as Reason will turn me aside.”

Aton thought of his own headlong drive to unite with the minionette, her hair red for passion, black for death. Reason—how could it hope to bridge the cold, bleak void gaping open, the loss of a song that was healed, a shell that was broken? The moth hurt because its wings were ashes, but had not yet grasped the fact that it could no longer fly. With what mixture of metaphor could he analyze himself? Caterpillar to the inferno?

“But you are sane and free now.” Unlikely.

“Neither one is natural,” Bedside said. “But yes: I have more sanity and more freedom now than ever in my life before, and this is the offer I bring to you.”

“Freedom and sanity—in
Chthon?
You offer garbage,” Aton said, and positioned himself for action.

“Did you imagine,” Bedside said, curiously quiet, “that you could brave the lungs and the stomach of Chthon, and not be accountable to the brain?”

“I’m not accountable to your god. I won my freedom.”

“Not yet,” Bedside said. “Chthon granted you a reprieve. You did not conquer it.” The words had a familiar ring. How many forces fancied they were manipulating his life? Or were they fancies?

“As you remarked,” Bedside continued, “we are very much alike. By normal standards, I am mad. Only my mission for Chthon preserves my balance. Chthon takes care of me in a way you will soon understand. But you—”

“I was judged to be criminally insane,” Aton admitted. “On Hvee, that term is still in vogue. But that was before the death of the minionette. I am well, now.” The falsity of that statement stung him as he made it. The hvee did not love him any more, which meant that he was totally depraved, whether he comprehended the reason or not. Had Coquina suspected? Was this the reason she had kept her distance? Then why had she cared for his body, all this time? Why had she sent him forth to defeat this “evil one”? Too much was unresolved.

But he would do this one thing, for her, for the sake of the love he thought he felt, though he knew it now to be a shallow, selfish thing, a love unworthy of her. He would make this offering, since she seemed to want it: the lifeless body of Bedside.

“Your particular madness stems from a biological basis,” Bedside said. “There is no cure for it. You cannot undo your parentage. You will go on killing sadistically because the minion in you craves the telepathic pleasure of innocent pain. You will go on forgetting your crimes because the man in you cannot accept the guilty pleasures your other self demands. You will go on vindicating the judgment of those who proscribed Minion, hating yourself far more than any other thing—and not without justice.

“Oh, yes—you know your madness now, don’t you, minion?”

“I did kill,” Aton said, “but not sadistically. There was justice and mercy in my action. I was not the chimera.”

Bedside did not relent. “I am not talking of honest murders, minion. I know there are times in Chthon when killing is necessary. Nor do I mean your failures: your Idyllia girl, your vengeance on the minionette, the cavern woman. You tried to kill them all, but you were so much at war with yourself that you could neither love nor hate effectively.

“No, not these actions. But think back to one specific case: your little friend, Framy. (Yes, my god tells me everything.) You protest your innocence there because you did not technically spill his blood. But you betrayed the nether caverns, and pinned the blame on him, and had him posted for execution. And you were there, listening, when the chimera came. Your minion sensitivity responded to the savage little mind of the chimera as it stalked, and you knew it was coming for Framy. You could have alerted the others, and saved him—but you did not. You were there, savoring his agony, as that chimera struck, and still you gave no alarm. Only his dying scream alerted the others—too late.

“This is what you did in Chthon, not once but many times. You used the chimera to gratify your brutal passion. Was this your justice? Your—sanity?”

Aton remembered. Chthon, where his lust for pain had been intensified by confinement. The men whose dying he had savored, the macabre tortures inflicted upon them by a creature he could have stopped, but didn’t, as their life-blood dwindled. The unholy ecstasy that had thrilled him, the almost religious joy culminating in transported spasms of pleasure as those death agonies came.

He remembered, too, the trial, on Hvee: the experts testifying that his aberration was after all biological, not emotional, and that there could be no cure. That he had not murdered, yet, but could not be set loose again, for the safety of mankind. That even a complete personality-wash would not remove his proscribed urges. He remembered the sentence: Chthon.

The minion traits had come upon him with maturity, but for a time had been wholly directed to the search for his minionette. When her influence diminished, the horror began. His love of Coquina had been the last struggle of the human qualities within him—a losing struggle.

The hvee had known. It had not been with him during his madness. It had loved what he once was; but when, after Chthon, it touched his macabre hand…

“This is the reason,” Bedside said, “that you will return to Chthon. There you will be safe—from your fellow man, since you are an outlaw, and from yourself. Chthon will support your sanity more perfectly than you can ever do yourself. Chthon will be your god, and you and I will be brothers—forever secure, forever free.”

It was tempting. Aton saw that his entire adult life had been a destructive nightmare of passion and pain, contaminating everything it touched. The minionette had been part of it, naturally and knowingly. But Coquina—it would be kindest for her if he had the same courage of the minionette before him, and simply stepped out of her life. She would be better off with her own kind. The love he bore her could achieve its finest expression in deprivation.