Chthon (27 page)

But the minionette had died to give him human semblance. She had known him well, known of his link with Chthon, and had cried out against it. Malice and Coquina, minionette and human, his first and second loves—these two had come together not as rivals but as sincere collaborators for his benefit. They had agreed that he had a chance, and both had staked their lives upon it. Could he betray them now?

Perhaps both were mistaken—but they believed in his recovery, and he owed it to both to make the ultimate effort, to resist the easy way. He could not abolish his crimes by running away from life. He had to live, to atone, to make some effort to balance the scales. He had to face what he was and what he had done—and search for a way to make amends. This, perhaps, was the real battle he had come to participate in: that against the capitulation rendered so attractive by Doc Bedside.

“No,” Aton said.

Bedside’s aspect changed. “I will show you what you are,” he said, his voice sharp, his mouth gaping, teeth exposed like those of the cavern salamander. “You rationalize, you delude yourself with hopes of future goodness. But your true wish is still to kill yourself, because you know you are the partner in a crime against your culture. You tried to blame the minionette, but
you
are the one that forced the act. Yes, you know what I mean, minion.”

Aton’s attitude also changed subtly as he listened. It was coming now, and he could neither stop it nor tolerate it. Bedside’s blade was on guard. His space training had prepared him for action against a knife—but not one wielded by the hand of a mad surgeon. Normal reflexes would not be sufficient.

Bedside continued: “You have so conveniently forgotten your incestuous passions. Careful!” he rapped as Aton moved. “I would not kill you so long as Chthon needs you, but you would not find my surgery entirely painless.”

This was Bedside’s final effort. Could he nullify it? The man was infernally clever.

There in your spotel,” Bedside whispered intently. “That’s when you did it. Chthon knows. That’s when you had the minionette alone, knowing what she was.” The bright eye-lenses glittered in the green glow, just above the pointing blade. “
That’s when you raped your moth
—”

The knife clattered to the floor as minion struck with the strength and speed of telepathy. Bedside stared at the thing he had loosed, a living chimera. “Pray to your god for help!” it whispered, hot teeth poised, talon fingers barely touching the bulging eyeballs, ready to nudge them redly out of their sockets. “Perhaps it will help you die.”

They remained in frozen tableau, the young warrior and the old. Then the chimera faded. Aton let the man fall, unharmed. “I am not what I was,” he said, “and I was never the
physical
chimera. I will not kill you for distorting what you do not understand.”

Bedside lay where he had fallen, at Aton’s feet. The menace in him was gone; he was a tired old man. “You have slain your chimera.”

“I have slain it.”

“I return to Chthon in the morning. You are free.”

Aton went to the port and swung out, feet searching for the ladder.

“Let me speak for a moment as a man,” Bedside said, halting Aton’s descent. “Chthon desires your service, not your demise. There is no resentment. Chthon will help you to win your other battle.”

“No.”

“Listen, then. Had I had a woman like your Coquina to love me, I would never have needed Chthon. She broke my arm, eleven months ago—I had not thought she knew your fighting art—but she is a woman you cannot replace. You will lose her, unless—”

Aton dropped down to the ground and began to move away.

“Think, think of the date!” Bedside cried after him. “And of the hvee! Otherwise…” But his voice was lost in the rapid distance.

Eighteen

Aton had defeated the evil one of Chthon, once he recognized it as himself, his sadistic killer instinct. The prison of Chthon was the refuge of those who were dominated by such impulses. Doc Bedside, now the agent of Chthon, had almost proved that Aton had escaped in body only; but the sacrifice of the minionette and the care of the daughter of Four had swung the balance and brought the civilized man in him to victory. He
had
been roused too soon; with more time he would have come to understand and accept the painful truths he had blinded himself against. Blindness had not solved the problems of Oedipus, nor had the ritualistic physical blinding of victims solved the problems of the men of Minion. Aton had been obsessed with blindness, physical and emotional.

More time, and Bedside could not have roused the dying chimera at all. It had been close—unnecessarily close. Why had he been thrust into battle prematurely? Could Coquina have wanted him to lose?

No, it was not possible to doubt her motives. Coquina was good, and she loved him far more than he had ever deserved.
He
had been the one to fall short, every time. He had denied their betrothal, even before he had met her. He had thrown her off the mountain. He had killed the hvee.

Think of the hvee, and of the date. What cryptic message had Bedside intended?

How little he knew Coquina, after all. His brief time with her on Idyllia, in retrospect, had been the happiest of his life. If he had only been able to stay with her then, instead of chasing his own obsessions. He had, he knew, a great deal in common with the daughter of Four. Her background was naturally similar to that of a son of Five. She was intellectual, upper-class Hvee, on a planet that made no presumption of democracy; she was a far cry from the low-caste girls of the latter Families. Lovely shell! Why had he never looked inside? How well Aurelius had chosen!

Think of the hvee
….

But the hvee had died. All his life had been nightmare, except for Coquina—and the hvee had condemned that too. Had he won the battle of his future, only to endure it alone?

Think of the date
….

The date was Second Month, §403: no more distinctive than any other month or year, on the even-tempered, non-seasonal planet of Hvee. This appeared to be an extraneous riddle.

The hvee—there was something meaningful. Bedside could not have known about the recent episode, since it had happened less than an hour prior to their conflict. But he had known that it
would
happen, whenever Aton actually touched his plant. He had warned that Coquina would be lost, unless—

Aton began to regret his contemptuous sloughing off of Chthon’s emissary. What was there about the hvee that could save Coquina for a man it had deemed unworthy? A quality that a knowledgeable third party could predict?

Think
…

Aton thought. His steady jog carried him across the countryside, familiar from his childhood. He could smell the light perfume of the scratched tree barks, of scuffled earth and crushed weeds and wild forest flowers. He could see the black outlines of the taller trees against the starry sky, and hear the nocturnal scufflings of minor foragers. Memories stirred in him, small poignant recollections of detail that became important only because it was unimportant. The feel of a dry leaf, the whiff of an idle breeze—all the wonderful things set aside by adulthood. Soon, now, he would pass near the spot where he had met the minionette, where he had acquired the wild-growing hvee.

The minionette had plucked it from the ground, and he, too knowledgeable at seven, had prevented her from keeping it. “Hvee is only for men!” he had asserted, and so she had made him a present of it, and it had been his until his betrothal. It had been his after that, too, for it would not live in the possession of a woman who did not love him. The hvee loved its master, and tolerated the lover of that master, so long as that love endured, and so long as that person was worthy.

The minionette had plucked it.

The minionette!

The hvee had fixed on her!
She
was its mistress!

Suddenly it fell into place. He had loved her sufficiently, or perhaps his minion blood had loved her, to preserve the plant. And she had after all been worthy, not evil. The hvee responded to true emotion, and did not notice inversions. The hate Aton had thought he felt for her, later, had been false hate. The hvee had not been misled.

The death of the minionette had taken with it not only the evil chimera, but also the good hvee—except that the hvee, in the possession of the lover of the lover, had not known that its original object of affection was gone. Coquina had seen the dead minionette, but she had not understood that this was the mistress of the hvee—and the hvee had taken her innocent faith for its own. Love, not reason, was its essence. Even its apparent judgment of worthiness was illusory. It loved the man who, basically, loved himself, and rejected the one who genuinely hated himself.

Had the hvee really belonged to Aton, it might have died anyway.

But he had not actually been condemned. It had died because
he
knew the fate of its mistress, and knew her link with it, though never consciously aware of it. When the hvee came back to him and his knowledge, it had to wither.

He could take a second hvee and offer it to Coquina. This one would not die.

He came into sight of the house. A dim light burned in the window.

Doubt continued to nag him. Why had she sent him out prematurely? Why had she refused to touch him? After she had devoted three years of her life to the care of a dying father and a terribly living son, with the end of torture so near—why had she been crying?

Think of the date
….

Yes, the date had been premature. But
why?
Bedside must have intended something.

He reached the house and pushed open the door without a pause. A man turned to meet him—a stranger. He was husky, perhaps fifty, at the prime of life, with a solemn visage and worksoiled hands. There was power in his bearing, unobtrusive but immovable. This was Benjamin Five, the uncle he had almost forgotten.

“Where have you been, Aton?” Benjamin inquired gravely, his tone disconcertingly like that of Aurelius. Behind him a woman’s form was lying on the couch.

“Coquina!” Aton exclaimed, passing Benjamin with disrespectful haste. She did not stir. Her pale hair fell limply over the edge of the couch and almost touched the floor. “Coquina—I will give you another hvee—”

“Young man, it is too late for that,” Benjamin said.

Aton ignored him. “Coquina, Coquina—I won the battle! The evil one is gone.” Her eyelids flickered, but she did not speak. “Coquina.” He put his hand on hers.

Her hand was cold.

Think of the date
….This was the year and the month of the chill. The chill! She was dying, far past the point of return.

“Did you think her love was less, young cousin,” Benjamin murmured, “because it did run smoothly?”

Aton understood at last. The chill had struck Hvee in the first month of §305, and was due again in the second month of §403. Coquina knew this well, as every resident of Hvee knew it, and could have left the planet—if she had not had a virtual invalid to care for. There had been no place off the planet where she could hide Aton—not from the scrutiny that quarantine officials still gave every ship leaving a planet under siege. And so she had stayed, and had risked the chill with him, and had lost. Instead of leaving the moment she contracted it, Coquina had remained, caring for him—and had finally roused him so that he would not wake alone, confused and helpless, or die from neglect under the drugs.

No—her love had not been less.

She had wanted him to win his freedom while she lived, while her support was with him.

The chill. He would have known the moment he touched her, for she had been far gone when she had talked to him. She must have sustained consciousness only with great effort, while trying to prepare him for a contest she only partly understood herself. Now that contest was over, her part was done, and she had stopped fighting.

Unless she had stopped fighting when she had seen the hvee die.

Aton kneeled for interminable moments beside her, his hand on hers, looking upon her quiet face. Was she never to know that he had not betrayed her that third time? The tears came to his own eyes as the cold crept from her hand to his, crept on into his spirit.

My love, he thought to her, my love for you is not less either. All of what you shared with the minionette before, belongs to you alone, now. My second love is greater than the first.

She lay still.

Aton bowed his head, defeated. “The price for freedom is too great,” he said.

There was an imperative knock on the door. “That’s Chthon,” Aton said to Benjamin, no longer caring whether his semi-telepathy showed.

Bedside entered. He went immediately to the dying girl. “Terminal,” he said.

Aton nodded. The last of Bedside’s riddles was becoming clear. It was Aton’s turn to make a sacrifice.

“I will pray to your god,” he said to Bedside, “if only she lives.”

Bedside nodded acceptance. “We must go immediately.”

Aton got up and slid his arms under Coquina’s numb form, lifting her into the air. He carried her to the door.

Benjamin did not move. “I think you have sold your soul,” he said.

Aton stepped into the night. The clear stars shone overhead—stars that he would not see again. ” ‘Hide, hide your golden light!’ ” he quoted softly. ” ‘She sleeps! My lady sleeps! Sleeps…’ “

§400

16

The caverns were quiet. There was no wind at all, and even the current in the water had disappeared. Some liquid hung in stagnant pools, too shallow to swim in. The rock formations had taken on a peculiar cast, an unnatural gray, and the grotesque shape of diverging passages repelled the eye.

Foreboding grew. This had the smell of a dead end. The once-mighty river had gradually seeped away, and the plentiful game had become scarce. Once more the party traveled hungry. Soon the lots would come into use again, unless someone volunteered by collapsing. The last of Bedside’s markers had been spotted two marches ago. If another were not found by the end of this march, they would have to retrace the trail.