Chthon a-1 Read online

  The house of Eighty-One rose out of the darkness; thin squares of light edged the closed shutters. Aton skirted the steaming hog pen, his passage eliciting the usual incurious porcine grunts. The warm animal smell brought a sympathetic wrinkle of the nostrils, though he had long since ceased to find it objectionable. He came up to the rear of the house and tapped the twins’ window with the measured signal of old.

  There was no response. He poked a finger behind the loose shutter and pried it open, peering in as far as his angle of vision permitted. The room was empty.

  He banged the wall in futile anger. Where were they? How could they be gone when he wanted to talk? Knowing himself to be unreasonable and a trifle snobbish, he grew angrier yet. He knew that there were other things in the boys’ lives beside himself, particularly since it had been months since his last visit, but the proof of it was irritating. What was he to do?

  The shutters parted on a window farther along the dark wall and light flared out to strike the bushes and beam into the night sky. Aton stepped up to it, then hesitated. It could be one of the parents. They, perhaps more conscious of the difference in Family status, and not wanting trouble with the forceful Aurelius, discouraged the association of the children. Aton waited, holding his breath, as a head poked out: ebony outlines, features indistinguishable. Then a long braid flopped over the sill and dangled its ribbon below.

  “Jill!”

  She spun her head toward him, trying to penetrate the gloom. “That you, Aton?”

  He ducked below the spilling light and caught the swinging hair, giving it a sharp rug.

  “Ouch!” she yelped, exaggerating her pain. She caught at his hand and disengaged his fingers. “That’s Aton, all right. I’d know that jerk anywhere!”

  He got up to face her squarely. “Jerk, am I?”

  Her face was very close to his. Her even eyes, pupils black in the shadow, looked back with unexpected depth. “When you jerk my hair—”

  He had missed the pun. Embarrassed, and unwilling to admit it, he leaned forward and touched his lips to hers.

  The contact was light, but that unpremeditated action surprised him as much as it did her. Jill had always been the tagalong, the drag, the interference in male affairs, the baby sister. Her unconcealed interest in Aton had always bothered him, his irritation accentuated because he was never able to admit his displeasure. He had responded with cruelty, angry at himself for that, but able to think of no alternative.

  This was no forest nymph. These lips, while not wholly unresponsive, were untrained. They lacked finesse. There was no magic—except that he was kissing Jill and finding her unrepulsive. He wondered whether he should stop.

  She was the one to terminate it, finally, lifting away her head and taking a breath. “Too late for that salt, now,” she said. “You already banged the bomb.”

  “I was looking for the twins.” He was unable for the moment to rise to the repartee. Had he, in reality, been looking for this girl? The thought upset him.

  She nodded, one braid brushing his face. “I figured it. They’re playing checkers with Dad, up front. Want me to fetch one of them for you?”

  “Checkers? Both of them?” Aton asked, trying to keep the conversation going while he settled an obscure but powerful internal conflict.

  “Both together. They keep losing, too. Jerv is getting mad.”

  Aton had no comment. The silence lengthened between them, awkward, uncomfortable. Neither moved.

  Finally he put out a hand, holding it there, letting her interpret his meaning, and not certain that there was any meaning there.

  “Well,” she said, and this seemed to make the decision. She took his hand, leaning on it as she brought her foot up to the sill. Her firm legs and thighs showed through the material of skirt and slip in silhouette, stirring a guilty excitement in him.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, withdrawing. Had she changed her mind already? He seethed with disappointment and relief. But in a moment the light went out and she was back. “They’ll think I’m in bed.”

  Aton helped her down, placing both hands on her waist just above the swelling hips and lifting her away from the high sill. She was heavier than he had thought, and they stumbled together and almost fell as her feet touched the ground. She was nearly as tall as he.

  They walked together past the pigpen, this time drawing no remarks, and went on down the remembered trail, selecting this direction by silent consent. Aton’s mind was whirling. It seemed impossible—yet she was a girl, with a body budding into womanhood. She had always liked him, and now she had chosen to express that liking more directly.

  They found themselves beside the ancient hideout. The bushes had overrun the entrance, but the main space seemed to be intact. Aton squeezed through first, feeling carefully in the pressing dark, in case there were lizards. He brushed away a few loose burs.

  She joined him silently. They would talk now, and she would try to get close, as she always had, and he would push her away automatically, and she would toss her head and giggle…

  She found his head, turned it, and placed her mouth against his. His hands came up to push at her chest, touched, and jumped away. Without interrupting the kiss, she caught hold of his shirt and pulled herself closer.

  They broke, and she lay back, her form just visible as his eyes acclimatized. “I thought you were just teasing, before,” she said. “But you aren’t, now, are you? I mean.”

  “No,” Aton said, uncertain whether he was being mocked.

  “All my life, it seems, I’ve been waiting for you to do that. And now it’s done.” Had she meant the kiss?

  Aton studied her as well as he was able. She was wearing a summer blouse, gently mounded, and a darker skirt that blended with the ground. She had kicked off her slippers and her white feet stood out, the toes wiggling. “I might do more,” he said, half afraid she would be angry, though he had never paid any attention to her anger before.

  “Aton,” she murmured, “You do anything you want. You—” Her voice cut off, as though she were afraid she had said too much.

  “Jill, I won’t make fun of you any more—ever,” he told her, trying to stave off an excitement he did not understand nor wholly trust. He was sure, now: this had been her original intent. But did she truly know what it involved?

  “You never made fun, Aton. Not really. Not so I minded.”

  He placed his hand on her blouse, deliberately now, pressing on the softness beneath. She did not object. He stroked, interested but not satisfied, and afraid, despite his bravado, to do more. Then, carefully, he tugged the material loose from her waistband. “Do you mind if I—?”

  “Anything you want, Aton. You don’t have to ask me. Here.” She sat up. He lifted the blouse over her head, seeing her small breasts rise as her arms went up. She wore no bra.

  Aton cupped one breast in his hand, feeling its delicate texture, running his thumb over the nipple. Holding her that way, he brought her sitting torso to his and kissed her again. This time there was fire. His tongue reached out to taste the sweetness of hers.

  She sank back slowly, and he followed her, kissing her cheek, her throat, her breast. She brushed her fingers through his hair. “Salt—who needs it?” she inquired softly.

  He forgot caution and put one hand on her knee, just below the spreading skirt. Her legs parted a little, and he slid his hand up over the kneecap and against the inside of her thigh. The flesh was smooth and very warm.

  Throbbing anxiety took him. She had let him go this far; had he reached the limit? If he should expose himself, if he dared, would she take flight and bear a story to her parents that he could hardly deny?

  His hand moved on, sliding past boundaries he had hardly dared imagine before. Abruptly it met the junction of her thighs. The soft down told him that she wore no underclothing here, either. Shivering with tension and excitement, he explored farther—and found a thick moisture.

  Blood! he thought, shocked. I have trespassed and I have hu
rt her and now she is bleeding!

  He snatched his hand away and lay beside her with the drumbeat of his heart filling the hideout. What have I done! he thought.

  Visions of consequence obsessed his mind. The outrage of Eighty-One, the shame of Five. “Why did you do it, you lecherous juvenile!” they would say. “Don’t you know you must never never never touch a girl there?” Would they have to take her to a hospital? How would he ever get her back to her room?

  The passion in him died, blasted away by his crime. His eyes stared into the faint cross-lace of branching shrubbery above, limned against the starry sky—a sky not one whit colder than the clutching terror in his heart. What have I—what—she’s only thirteen!

  Jill’s hand touched his arm. “Aton?”

  He jumped. “Believe me, I never meant to—”

  “What’s the matter with you, all of a sudden?” she demanded, rolling over to peer into his face.

  Didn’t she know? “The blood. There’s blood.”

  She stared. “Blood? What are you talking about?”

  “Down—between—I felt it. I never—”

  “You’re crazy. It’s not the time of the—” Suddenly she giggled. “Blood? You mean you thought that was—? Haven’t you ever done this before?”

  He lifted his head, finding her hot breasts close under his chin. “Before?”

  “You don’t know!” she exclaimed, the thoughtless child in her ascendant over the dawning woman. “You really don’t! And here all the time I was looking up to you, waiting for you. I thought you were the big boy.”

  Aton cowered behind his raging shame, unable to reply.

  Abruptly she was the woman again. “I’m sorry, Aton. I guess you don’t get out much. Here—I’ll show you how—”

  But he was on his hands and knees, scrambling away from her, barging out, finding the open night and running, sick with shock and embarrassment.

  Three

  Aton became a handsome, outwardly confident young man of twenty. He never spoke of his plans; on Hvee it was taken for granted that the son of high Family would advance to his father’s fields. At last he received the summons he had known would come.

  The living room of the house of Aurelius was generous and comfortable. A substantial hard-backed wooden chair, almost a throne, sat in a corner, parallel to the entrance; no one could exit without passing under the survey of that grim relic. A plush full-length couch lay against the far wall, seldom used. Above it, placed on the wall so that it faced Aurelius’s chair, was a color photograph of a handsome young woman: Dolores Ten, dead these twenty years and more, in childbirth. Aton had never been able to face that picture without experiencing a deep and painful guilt, compounded by another and rather different emotion that never found conscious expression.

  Aurelius Five was old, far nearer to death than his chronological age required. In health he would have been a powerful man, competent, determined, and scheduled to live another fifty years at least; but he was not in health, and only the power of his mind remained. He had exposed his body to the foul spring swamp (’spring’ by convention only, on seasonless Hvee) too many years, and the incurable—locally—blight had taken hold. Aurelius, being what he was, had refused to spend a long convalescence on far-distant Earth, away from his farm. He had left the planet once, only once, and vowed never to do so again, and now he was in the process of dying for that vow. Aton, knowing something of the prior circumstance, agreed with the principle, though he never took it upon himself to tell his father so. They were not that close.

  Aurelius might work three more years, and live five. Already he spoke slowly, tired too easily. He was the shell of his youth. The hvee tolerated him, but not gladly; too much of the swamp infested him now, anathema to the tender plants. His frame was gaunt: there seemed to be too little flesh between the hanging skin and brittle bone.

  “Aton,” the worn man said. “Soon—”

  Aton stood beside his father, expecting to find no pleasure in the interview, but knowing that this had to be. There was too much of sorrow in their relationship, and each saw it in the other, with a premonition that that sorrow had not yet reached its nadir. They shared a cross that could not be put down until more than death had come to pass.

  “Soon you must farm the hvee yourself,” Aurelius said, speaking with all the certainty he could muster, pitiful in the implied insecurity of it. “Soon you must take your wife.”

  It was out—the condition he had feared. Farming was not a solitary occupation. The death of the daughter of Ten, wife to Aurelius, had damaged the crops of Five, and only Aton’s early success had prevented complete ruin. The emotional climate had to be correct for hvee, and here it was not. The successful farm was run by a family, and the matches were most carefully made. The matter was far too important to be left to the idiosyncrasies of the young.

  “Who is she?”

  Aurelius smiled, taking the question for assent. “She is the third daughter of eldest Four,” he said.

  Four, eldest. This was a good match indeed. Aurelius deserved his tinge of pride. The possessors of First names preferred to have sons to carry on the lineage, but they protected their daughters by wifing them as prominently as possible. Many times the highborn daughters declined to marry at all, rather than drop in station. The ranking of Five was a favorable one, but there were many eager daughters below, and few above. There must have been complex negotiations.

  Aton felt a pang, knowing that the effort had gone for nothing. The Families of Hvee were regarded by offworlders as aloof and cold, and in many ways they were; but within the formalistic structure the bonds were deep. Aton seldom spoke to his father, and the relationship between them was something less than usual even for this culture, but it did not surprise him to discover that Aurelius had gone to great pains to arrange an advantageous marriage. The line had to be continued honorably, and Aton was the only man bearing the name of Five who could accomplish this.

  “No.”

  Aurelius went on. “For you, with a wife, a good wife, the hvee will grow. For you the farm will prosper…” He drifted to a stop. Aton’s answer had penetrated. He closed his tired eyes to shut in the hurt.

  “I must take another,” Aton said.

  The old man did not try to argue, overtly. “She is strong, she is fair,” he said. “I have seen her. On all of Hvee there is not a finer match. She is not like the—the degradingly promiscuous sluts of the latter Families. You would… love her.”

  Aton bowed his head, ashamed for himself and for his father. Aurelius had never stooped to pleading in his life, but he seemed close to it now.

  “She is a song, a broken song in the forest,” Aton said, trying to explain what could not be justified. Was he indeed afraid of a liaison with a local girl? He suppressed the thought immediately. “She kissed me and gave me my hvee; I can love no other.”

  Aurelius stiffened. Aton had not told him about the forest nymph before. The matching procedures of the Families did not deny the need for love; rather, they insisted upon it. The ritual of the hvee guaranteed it. Aton could not marry without his father’s approval, but he did not have to accept a woman he did not love.

  “Show her to me,” Aurelius said at last. He could not yield more. If Aton could bring home his nymph, she would be approved; if he could not, he was honor bound to give the arranged betrothal a chance.

  * * *

  Twenty-one, and the music for which he longed came once again. It was fleeting and haunting, but clear enough to his eager listening. He made for the forest, cruising through the several fields as rapidly as he could without damaging the hvee.

  Aurelius signaled from a nearby field. He was not able to work outside every day, but this time he had arranged it. He intended to meet the nymph, and Aton had in effect agreed. Aton waited in an agony of impatience for his father to catch up.

  It was the broken song, bending the very trees to its enchantment. It swelled, chord and descant, stirring Aton’s blood wi
th its ultimate promise. This time, this time—

  It ceased.

  Aton sprinted for the glade, hurdling the well, leaving Aurelius behind. He burst upon it.

  He stood absolutely still, listening for the sounds of her departure, but he could hear nothing above the noise of the man behind. She was gone.

  Aurelius came up, panting and staggering. But his eyes darted around the glade, fixing on the stump, the ground, the circling trees. He pointed.

  The dry leaves had been scraped away from one side of the rotting stump, exposing the spongy loam below. Symbols had been inscribed on the ground, hastily and crudely done by some pointed instrument.

  Aton studied them. “M-A-L-I-C-E,” he spelled out. “What does it mean?”

  Aurelius eased himself down upon the crumbling stump, scrutinizing the mystic letters. His breath grew ragged and his hands trembled; Aton realized with unacknowledged compassion that the strenuous exercise had intensified the man’s ague. “I was not sure,” Aurelius whispered, his tone oddly apologetic.

  Aton turned a questioning gaze to him.

  Aurelius wrenched his eyes from the ground. He spoke with difficulty. “It is the stigma of the minionette.”

  Aton stared into the sky of Hvee, upset and confused by the nymph’s flight. What had frightened her? Was she actually a creature not for the eyes of the skeptic? “Minionette?”

  “Man took his legends with him when he went to space,” Aurelius said. “Like man himself, they changed; but the stock is the same. You have heard of the terrible Taphids that consume entire spaceships; of the Xestian spidermen whose web-paintings penetrate all illusion; of the living hell of Chthon, where ultimate wealth and horror make eternal love. But this is the—the fable of the minionette.