Chthon Read online

  That was the tone of it. Once acclimatized to the heat and wind and able to find his way around the interlocking tunnels by sound and sight, Aton found prison life to be surprisingly easy. Too easy there could be no enduring drive towards escape, in such a situation. The inhabitants were contented, as he was not. He would have to find a catalyst.

  The caverns extended down interminably. The garnets were brought up from somewhere below for sorting and trade with the outside world. They commanded a price far beyond their actual worth as gems. Artificial stones could easily surpass them in quality, but lacked the appeal of notoriety. These were the produce of condemned hands, originating in nefarious Chthon. Man always placed a premium on the morbid.

  Aton found the attitude of the prisoners inexplicable. This was supposed to be the worst prison in the human sector of the galaxy, reserved for the criminally insane, the incorrigible, the perverted—those whom society could neither cure nor ignore. Chthon was pictured outside as the home of perpetual rampage and orgy, sadism and torture beyond belief.

  Instead Aton discovered a crude but placid society whose members followed their own advice: make no trouble. The genuinely insane were isolated in their cells and cared for by volunteer wardens. Unless these ventured out, they were left to their own devices.

  Even normal people could hardly be expected to get along so well. Were these really criminals? If not, why did they accept their lot so easily? There had to be a missing element, some binding force. He could not act until he understood its nature.

  2

  “Aton.” The voice was a low, warm alto.

  He came out of his reverie to discover the girl Selene, provocatively posed, not giggling. Her eyes had lingered on him whenever they met; but though aware of this, Aton had felt he should be wary of women until the other mysteries were solved. A woman was trouble anywhere.

  She came toward him, breasts outthrust. “I ain’t no Laza, Aton,” she said, intercepting his thought. “It ain’t going to kill you to come near me.”

  Aton was unmoved. “Tally’s woman, aren’t you?”

  “Tally knows where I am. Tally knows where everybody is, all the time.” She came to stand against him, soft and lithe and feline. “How long since you had a woman, Aton?”

  She had scored. It had been too long a time. He had learned the way of things in space, and space was over, now, perhaps forever. Judging from the attitude he had seen so far, she was probably telling the truth about Tally. He might even have sent her, as a gesture of amity.

  Selene moved away, hiding behind her water-skin. Certain that she had his attention now, she began to dance, with a rhythmic hop and swing fully as alluring as intended. Aton set his book against the wall and went after her.

  She giggled and skipped away. Playing an intricate hide-and-seek with hands and body, she led him into a side passage. Aton checked, suddenly wary, but it was empty.

  She brushed against him. He caught her and pinned her against her water-skin along the wall. Their lips met abruptly in a kiss, broke, touched passionately; then she escaped and pirouetted into the center of the cell. Her eyes glowed.

  Aton stalked her, cutting off the exit and herding her into a niche; she dodged and wriggled with delight.

  Selene began to hum a tune when she saw that she was fairly trapped. It was the final artifice: an innocent, indifferent melody, as though she were not aware of company. It should have launched him into the terminal effort.

  Instead it drove him back, cooling his ardor instantly. It was the broken song.

  She saw that something was wrong. “What’s the matter, Aton?”

  He turned his back. “Get out of here, Silly. You aren’t half the woman I crave.”

  Shocked, then in flashing anger, she ran. Aton listened to the sound of her footsteps, a bare patter in the screaming wind. They merged to form the music of the broken song.

  “Malice,” he thought. “Oh, Malice—will you never leave me?”

  • • •

  It was a dream, of course, but only Aton knew it, and he, lured by the might-have-been it dangled before him, was foolish enough to forget that it was. In his conception he was not standing alone in the tunnel; the woman was not fleeing in anger. There had been a failure, yes, but not a total one.

  She took his arm as they walked down the dim tunnel. She wore a light blouse and dark skirt which did more to enhance her figure than any nudity could do.

  “Jill,” he said, “I wanted to apologize for what happened. But you have to understand the impact the song has upon me. When that comes—”

  She jogged his arm. He could feel the gentle pressure of her fingers through the coat. “My name is Selene,” she said.

  They turned into a side passage. It slanted down, expanding. “Your interest caught me by surprise,” he continued, aware of the awkwardness of his explanation. “Somehow I never thought of you as a woman, Jill.”

  “Why do you keep calling me “Jill”?” she demanded. “Look at me, Aton. I’m Selene. Silly Selene, cave girl.”

  He looked. “I suppose you are,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you, clothed.”

  “Thanks.”

  He guided her to a seat and found a place beside her. “I never realized there was one of these in Chthon. We had a theater for the crew on board the Jocasta, but I never attended…”

  He faded out, alarmed. Her hand was in his lap, fumbling with the fastening of his trousers. Then her fingers were inside, reaching down to discover what lay there. He tried to protest, but immediately the people in the neighboring seats turned to stare, forcing him to silence lest his exposure be advertised.

  The feature flashed on the big front screen. Aton’s attention leaped to embrace that still scene. A man, toiling up a steep path, a strong man in antique costume, a young man garbed in flowing robes of indeterminate color. One man, but filled with meaning. Behind him the trail tapered away to a rocky, mossy slope, strangely attractive as a landscape.

  The picture shifted, fading into another tableau. This time the foreground opened: a sheer drop with a horrifying hint of depth. The path had crested, as though running through a pass; indeed, one rounded hillock swelled in sight, while the surrounding land dipped away. Two men faced each other, having mounted on either side, meeting at the top. On the right was the strong young man of the previous picture; on the left, an older man, similarly dressed. They confronted, talking or debating. The old man’s arm was raised in imperious gesture.

  The third frame was more forceful: the young man’s body was twisted, caught in violent motion, arms outflung, face contorted. The other person was poised in space beyond the precipice, arms raised as if to flail the air, birdlike, but falling nevertheless. They had had an argument, a falling-out, perhaps a contest of strength over the right-of-way. Who could say, since the images were fragmentary and silent? But the deed was done, irrevocably. Far below, out of sight, Aton knew that there was a narrow river bed—and wondered why he knew.

  One more picture, seemingly unrelated to the prior sequence: a huge animal shape with mighty folded wings and the sensual breasts of a mature woman. Its mouth was open in a kind of question, as if to pose a riddle. That was all.

  Unutterable horror seized Aton, a sick revulsion that churned his stomach and drove his senses back away from his naked face, recoiling from the monstrous import.

  Now there was sensation in another area. He looked down and saw the female hand, clamped like calipers, stretching cruelly. But it was a cord, a serpentine length of it, blood-red in the half-light, connecting his belly to hers. He saw her face, and it was not the face of Laza, who would kill him, but another face, more lovely and more evil than any he could imagine.

  He tried to wrench free, but could not move. The pain of his emotion was terrible as the stretching continued, a narrowing tautness wrenching the root loose from the flesh. Suddenly the melody steamed up from the horror and he knew fulfillment at last.

  He woke, sweating, shaking, to the app
roach of footsteps, knowing that he had to get out of Chthon.

  3

  “Five.” This time it was a man’s voice. Selene had not taken long to spread the word. He turned to find Tally and two of his helpers. “I didn’t touch her,” Aton said.

  Tally was grim. “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

  Aton kept a wary eye on the two other men. He knew their business, and he recognized one of them. “Because Silly made a pass at me?”

  “Partly,” Tally said with candor. “She shouldn’t have had to do that. But then you turned her down.”

  “I wasn’t making any trouble.”

  “No trouble!” Tally exploded. “You damned outsider! You made me the laughing stock of Chthon by proving my girl wasn’t worth taking down. Teasing her so you could really make the point. You could have told her No at the beginning, if you didn’t want it; but no, you had to—”

  “It wasn’t that. I wanted her, but—”

  Tally’s eyes were calculating. ” ‘But—’? What were you afraid of? Nobody outside will ever see you again. You live our way now. There are no ceremonies, no two-faced rules. She wanted you, and I told her to have her fling. You can’t spawn any bastards down here, not in this climate, if that’s what got you. It just doesn’t take.”

  “I knew that. I—”

  “You cost me face, Five. There’s only one way I can get it back.”

  “There’s something else—” Aton began, but Tally had already signaled, and the two men were closing in. They were brawny; one was the member of the original greeting party who had struck him. They had taken off their skins.

  Aton saw that there was no reasonable escape. He licked his lips, not bothering to remove his own water-skin. Had he really wanted to explain?

  Timing. Coordination. Decision. Aton sprang. The first man had a naked foot buried in his solar plexus before he realized it. He was hurled back, collapsing bonelessly. Before he struck the ground, Aton was on his companion, wrapping a trained hand in the man’s shaggy beard, jerking the original lunge into a headlong stumble. The calloused knuckles of Aton’s free hand made a dull crunching sound on the other’s temple.

  One semiconscious, retching helplessly. One dying with a fractured skull. It had taken perhaps four seconds.

  Tally stared down, amazed. “Spaceman,” he said.

  “You wanted it the hard way.” Aton knew he had won the man’s respect. “I tried to explain,”

  Tally got the men out and came back alone. “All right. I can’t square things with you that way. Only one man I ever saw that could fight like that, and he’s not… available.”

  “Spaceman?” Aton asked with interest.

  “Krell farmer.”

  Aton wondered. The members of the guild that farmed the deadly krell weed had developed the ancient art of karate—kara-ate, the unarmed striking—in a different direction than had their spacefaring cousins. Both struck to disable, maim, or kill; but there was murderous power behind the spaceman’s blow, lethal science behind the farmer’s. Which school was superior? The question had never, to his knowledge, been settled. “Where is he?”

  “Name’s Bossman—down below. It isn’t worth it.”

  “Nothing’s worth it.”

  Tally changed the subject. “I’ll take my loss and forget it. But I want to know one thing, and it isn’t much of my business. I’ll make a trade with you.”

  Aton understood the significance of the offer, in this place where information was more valuable than property. “I want to know something, too,” he said. “Honest answers?” He saw immediately that the question was a mistake. The person who cheated on information would not live long.

  “Let’s match the questions,” Tally said. The bargaining was on.

  “The real Chthon setup.”

  “The reason you passed her up.” Belatedly, Aton understood why Tally had cut off his explanation before. He could not accept free knowledge. Easier to settle the grudge first, untangle the threads later. Here was an honest man, Chthon-fashion.

  “You may not like the answer,” Aton said.

  “I want it straight, all of it.”

  They looked at each other and nodded. “Seemed too quiet for you here?” Tally asked rhetorically. “No wonder. This is only part of Chthon—the best part. We keep only the model prisoners: the harmless neurotics, the politicos, the predictable nuts. We have a pretty easy life because we’re selected, we know each Other, and we have the upper hand. But below—well, there is only one way to get down there, and no way back. Anybody we can’t handle gets dropped down that hole and forgotten. That’s where the mine is; we ship food down, they ship the garnets up.”

  “A prison within a prison!”

  “That’s right. Outside, they think we’re all one big unhappy family, fighting and mining. Maybe that’s the way it is, below. We don’t know. But we like it quiet, here, and we have the same hold on the pit as the outsiders have on us: no garnets, no supplies. We get first pick of the food, and we don’t have to work much, except to keep things running smoothly. We can’t get out but we have a living, and not a bad one at all. Every so often a new man comes down, like you, and makes things interesting for a while, until we get him placed.”

  “No way out,” Aton said.

  “Our caverns are sealed off from below. That keeps us in, and the monsters out. Below—no one knows where those passages end, or what’s in them.”

  Unexplored caverns! There was the only hope for escape. It would mean facing a prison even the hardened inmates feared, mixing with men too vicious to accept any moral restraints. But it was a situation he could exploit.

  “About Silly,” Aton said, taking his turn, knowing his course. “It wasn’t her; it wasn’t you. She’s a good girl; I would have taken her if I could. But something stopped me, something I can’t fight.”

  “Stopped a spaceman at the point? You’re a strange one. You and your damned book.”

  Aton said the word that condemned him: “Minionette.”

  Tally stared. “I’ve heard of that. Stories—you mean you met one? They really exist?”

  Aton didn’t answer.

  Tally backed off. “I’ve heard about what they do. About the kind of man who—” His voice, friendly before, turned cold. “You are trouble. And I sent Silly to you.”

  Tally came to his decision. “I don’t want to know any more. You aren’t one of us, Five. You’ll have to go below. I don’t care how many men you kill; you aren’t staying with us.”

  It was the reaction Aton had come to expect. “No killing,” he said. “I’ll go now.”

  §381

  One

  Hvee was a pastoral world without pastoral creatures whose rolling mountains and gentle dales bespoke no strife. No dwelling lay within sight of another, and few of the angularities of man’s civilization defaced the natural landscape. The population was small and select, hardly sufficient to man the smallest of cities on megapolistic Earth. There was just one major occupation and one export: hvee.

  A small boy wandered through the circular fields of the Family of Five, careful not to tread on the green flowers yearning toward him. Too young to cultivate the crop, he could afford to be its friend. The hvee plants all about him projected, in effect, a multiple personality, an almost tangible aura that was comforting indeed.

  He was seven years old, his birthday just one day behind, and he was still awed at the marvel of it, of that extra year so suddenly thrust upon him. The planet was smaller now, by a seventh of his life, and he wanted to explore it all over again and come to understand its new dimension.

  In his arms he carried a large, heavy object, his birthday gift. It was a book, sealed in shiny weatherproof binding and closed by a bright metal clasp with a miniature combination lock. Ornate letters on its surface spelled out L O E, and beneath them, in script, his name: ATON FIVE.

  The virgin forest of Hvee stood at the edge of the gardens, the trees less responsive to human mentality than the
cultivated plants, but friendly all the same. The boy walked in the shadow of the wood, looking back toward the house of his father, Aurelius, far across the field. He stood beside the new garden shed, built within the year, looking winsomely up at its lofty peaked roof and thinking thoughts too large for him. Then he looked down behind it, where the hot black highway wriggled toward the distant spaceport—a pavement leading beyond even his present horizons.

  At this moment of introspection the sound of music came, borne on the gentle wind, almost too fleeting to be real. The boy stopped to listen, turning his head this way and that, searching out the strains. His musical sense was untrained, but the compelling beauty of this melody could not be denied.

  The song rose and fell in spectral ululations, the tenuous melody from some faerie instrument. There were bird-songs in it, and the rippling of hidden forest water, and the delicate sounds of the uncomplicated melodies of ancient troubadours. Aton was reminded of music he would later come to recognize as “Greensleeves” and “The Fountains of Rome” and older and younger pieces, and he was enthralled.

  Unfinished, it stopped. The boy of seven forgot his other explorations, overcome by a desire to listen to the finish. He had to hear its end.

  The melody began again, thrillingly, and he clutched the giant book to his chest and trailed his curiosity into the forest. The fascination grew, taking firmer hold on his mind; this was the loveliest thing he had ever heard. The great trees themselves seemed responsive to it, standing silently and letting it drift among them. Aton touched the bark of their trunks as he passed, drawing courage as he skirted the bottomless forest well (afraid of its black depth) and went on.

  He could make out the music more readily now, but it had led him to an unfamiliar part of the forest. It was a voice—a woman’s voice, full and sweet with overtones of promise and delight. The delicate arpeggios of a soft-toned stringed instrument accompanied it, counterpointing the vocal. She was singing a song, the meaning of half-heard words fitting the mood of the forest and the day.