Chthon a-1 Read online

  “And they eat the Taphids!”

  “They may. They may raise them as pets. We don’t know. At any rate, they ordered this shipment. They pay well and their credit is excellent.”

  Aton shook his head. “Every time I think I’m used to space, it amazes me again. Yet if so many myths are true…” He left the sentence unfinished, thinking of the minionette.

  She glanced at him. “There is one problem.”

  “Naturally. That’s why Machinist Five was invited.”

  “The Xests are nonsexual creatures. They have great difficulty comprehending the human system. Traders have succeeded in a partial explanation, but misunderstandings remain. They believe that two beings, one male and one female, make up the composite human entity.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “The Xest mind misses the nuances.” She frowned. “As Captain, protocol requires that I visit in person. But to them—”

  “By yourself you’re only half a captain!” Aton slapped his knee. “Grievous violation of etiquette.”

  “Precisely.”

  * * *

  The Xests were small by human standards, under a hundred pounds if scaled by Earth gravity. Here, however, weight was only a quarter Earth-normal. Eight delicate appendages sprouted from the aliens’ globular bodies in phalangidean symmetry. Communication had to be by galactic signs; they had no conception of sound.

  Protocol further required the entertainment of the human for a specified period and the exchange of gifts. The Xests were semitelepathic, able to respond directly to emotion but not meaning, and believed that the honor paid to the visitor was automatically appreciated by the species. Captain Moyne presented them with several cylinders of emergency oxygen—a commodity as precious to them as to man—and in return an artisan contracted to produce a portrait of the human.

  It was not long before the Xest spokesman got off on the favorite riddle: the binary nature of man. “Two species to make one Human?” it signaled.

  “One species, two sexes,” Aton returned.

  “Yes, yes—Male of one species, Female of other.”

  “No, no—male and female of same species, Homo sapiens.”

  “Of same unit?” the sexless creature signed.

  This would be another term for their conception of blood relationship. “No, too close,” Aton began, but gave it up.

  Captain Moyne watched this exchange with a half-smile, but made no comment.

  “Will never understand,” the Xest finished, perplexed. “Fire and water mix to make Human. Inevitable destruction—but that is your problem. Let us talk of trade.”

  * * *

  The hosts understood the need for occasional estivation. A generous accommodation was provided for the Human: one bedroom, complete with bathroom fixture, kitchen fixture, appurtenances, bed.

  “All right,” said Aton. “Who gets it?”

  “I do,” the Captain answered firmly.

  “Don’t you think it should be share and share alike?”

  “No.”

  “Should I make a complaint to the innkeeper?”

  “Protocol forbids. You may absent yourself while I prepare to retire.”

  “But where will I sleep?”

  “When you return you may make yourself a lair on the floor.”

  Upon that return, he found her sitting up in bed clad in the filmiest nightgown he had ever seen through. The game, it appeared, was not over yet, and she had certainly come prepared. The surprising rondure of the woman behind the uniform was once more evident beyond any reasonable doubt. She both intrigued and frustrated him, and he was not entirely pleased by the suspicion that she understood this well.

  Aton sat on the edge of the bed. “What is your secret, Captain? You have the body of a young girl—a mature young girl—yet you must be fifty, at least.”

  “The years in space are brief,” she said. She retained the skullcap; no trace of her hair showed.

  “Not that brief.”

  “Leave a woman her secrets, and perhaps she’ll leave you yours.”

  There was an implication here. “What do you know of my secrets?”

  She leaned forward, letting the sheet drift to her slim waist, letting the nightgown pull tight. “The lay roster. You’ve been using it to search out every female crew member on the ship. You are seeking a woman.”

  She knew. Suddenly he wanted very much to talk about it, to lay bare the secret that had driven him from planet to planet and ship to ship for four years. The enormous futility of that search, that difficult seeking through stolen passenger lists and pay rosters for an imitation siren, that almost certain disappointment, brought a crashing misery about his soul. It was too much to bear.

  He became aware of himself cradled in her arms, his head against her beating breast. She held him closely, stroking his hair, while the sorrow and pain of his memory flowed from him. “I’m in love with an illusion,” he whispered. “A girl with a song played a game of love in the forest, and I can’t rest until that song is complete. I have to find her, even though I know—”

  “Who is she?” the Captain asked softly.

  Again the agony washed over him, a sea of despair he had dammed back too long. “She called herself Malice,” he said, “and I suppose it was allegorical. The name of a siren, a minionette, who lives to torment man. In that guise she gave me the hvee. If she exists, I am lost; if she does not, my life has been a dream, a tender nightmare.”

  She bent down and touched her lips to his with the tingle of fire. “Do you love her so much, Aton?”

  “I love her! I hate her! I must have her.”

  She kissed his cheek, his eyelids. “Can there be no other woman? No other love?”

  “None. Not until the song is finished. Not until I know what no person knows, what no text reveals. Oh, God, what I would do for love of Malice… only to have her with me.”

  She held him, and in time he drifted fitfully to sleep, still fully clothed. “It was so sweet, so sweet,” he thought he heard her say.

  * * *

  Negotiations for additional trade were completed the following day, and Aton and the Captain made ready to return to the Jocasta.

  “We thank you. Human,” the Xest spokesman signaled. “We now offer our gift to you, our portrait of yourself.”

  They brought forth a large covered framework. Aton wondered when their artist could have done the work, since neither he nor the Captain had posed. Unless the technique were subjective…

  The portrait was unveiled. It was, after all, a web-network, colored threads woven across the hollow frame, passing each other in intricate parallels and skews and slants, touching and tracing three-dimensional patterns in a kind of gossamer fascination. It signified nothing, at first; then, as his emotions began to respond to the sense of the design, lured inside by clever signal-strands, the whole crept into focus, a weird and vivid picture of a forest scene.

  Two people were depicted, coming alive through the alien magic, human, similar, yet oddly opposite. One, a strikingly beautiful woman, her hair the texture of a raging fire. The other, a small boy, a giant book in his arms, naked wonder in his face.

  Aton stared at it, hypnotized. “This is—the two of us?”

  “Our artistry is not easy to explain,” the Xest conveyed. “We do not understand the true nature of the Human. We have fashioned the portrait of you as you saw the two Male-Female parts of your being, when first you came together with comprehension. We hope this is of value to you.”

  Aton turned slowly to Captain Moyne. He saw the tears glisten in the depths of her deep green eyes.

  “Perhaps she had to hide,” she said. “The—the love of this man would cost her everything, in conventional terms, everything.”

  Slowly he put his hand to her tight cap and pulled it free.

  The billowing fire cascaded down around her shoulders.

  Aton touched the living hue of her hair. “You!” he said.

  III. Chill

&nbs
p; §400

  7

  Hastings plumped down beside Aton, his huge body steaming. “I tried,” he said sadly. “I tried—but I simply cannot pry a garnet out of that vacant wall in one piece. I’m jinxed.”

  “You’re fat,” Framy muttered helpfully from the other side. “Your stomach always beats you to it. Lucky you can even see a garnet, let ’lone reach it.”

  “I could reach it if I were able to see through the sweat,” Hastings said, smudging the moisture from his eyes. If Framy’s jibes bothered him, he never showed it. “I’m quick with my hands, but that heat—sometimes I long for a bout of the chill.”

  “The chill! I heard of that. You don’t get no stone from me this time, Hasty. The chill’d kill you.”

  Hastings’ eyes narrowed. Aton sat tight, knowing that the man would never have attempted to mine a garnet on his own unless his supply was low, and that he smelled a profitable encounter. Entertainment broke up the monotony of prison life when Hastings got hungry—and perhaps Framy, subdued for several chows after the disappointment of the blue garnet, was ready to play again. “Are you certain you know enough about the chill?” Hastings asked gently.

  “What’s there to know?” Framy picked at a broken toenail. “My buddy died of it, back on—never mind. He stopped over to settle a score on some planet and didn’t know the chill was going around. Didn’t know he had it himself, until it was too late. I thought sure I’d catch it from him, and I couldn’t no more go to the doc’n he could. He just got colder and colder and he died.”

  “There was an epidemic on Hvee—that’s my home—back in ’305,” Aton said, since he saw the signs that Framy had already been hooked and would pay the toll. “It came in the first month of the year. My great-grandfather Five was orphaned by it. Wiped out a third of the planet.”

  “Pandemic, not epidemic,” Hastings said. “Did you know that it occurs in regular cycles just over 98 years apart, and that just about half the worlds of the human sector have been struck by it at one time or another? That it is not contagious? That Earth itself is being struck right now?!

  Framy’s silence in the face of each artfully posed question had been determined but his resistance broke at last. His weakness was that he couldn’t bear to have anybody know something that he didn’t, even if the subject had no inherent interest for him. “You been here longer’n me!” he exclaimed. “You don’t know nothing about Earth.”

  Hastings settled back comfortably. “But it seems that I know something about the chill.” And waited smugly.

  “I already know about the chill. My buddy died of it. If there’d been a doc who’d keep his mouth shut—”

  “There is no cure for the chill,” Hastings said. Aton frowned at this.

  “You’re lying,” Framy said without conviction. “Lots of people been saved. They got to catch it in two days, though.”

  “Even then, there is no cure.”

  Inevitably, after desperate rear-guard action, Framy lost his garnet, the others gathered around to swell the audience, and the flow of news began.

  “Man,” Hastings said, adopting the tone that made the standing listeners find seats, “leapfrogged light to plant colonies hundreds and thousands of light-years from his home. But he was caught unprepared for the chill. In §25 a brand-new colony almost 700 light-years toward the galactic center (no point in going into proper galactic coordinates here: that will be saved for another garnet) reported the first case. A young laborer on the cultivating squad stopped at the clinic with a complaint of sudden shakes. They had lasted only a minute or two, he admitted, but surely he was coming down with something. The medic aimed a thermal gauge at him, found no fever, and packed him back to the field. Colonization was rough work and the indolent were not to be coddled. The matter was duly entered in the record and forgotten.

  “Five days later (Earth-time, naturally—this garnet doesn’t cover comparative chronology) he was back, with a slip from the foreman: his efficiency was low and he was too cheerful about failures. What was the matter? The medic gestured again with the gauge, found no fever—on the contrary the man’s body temperature was several degrees on the safe side—and referred him to the disciplinary squad.

  “Three more days passed. A friend brought the victim in this time. It was impossible to rouse him sufficiently for useful performance. The man was in an amiable stupor, and it was known that he had drunk no bootleg in two days. He no longer ate at all. And as long as he was here, the friend mentioned, he’d felt cold for a moment himself, a couple of days ago. As though a cold wash of air had descended on him, making him shiver, though no one else had felt it. It had passed in a minute and he felt fine now, better than ever, as a matter of fact, but… The medic automatically played the gauge over him, found no fever, dismissed him, made another entry in the record (for he was a good medic), and took the slack laborer in charge.

  The man’s body temperature was 297°K and dropping. This was an unusual departure from the human norm of about 310°K, and the medic was intrigued. The man had no symptoms that could not be accounted for by the chill itself; what caused the chill was a mystery. In due course the patient died and the fact was properly noted. A report was sent routinely to Earth where it was lost in clerical tape and forgotten.

  “Meanwhile three more men, including the friend, were down with it. They were not sick—that is, they had no fever—but the medic, catching a glimmer of a problem requiring a technique for which he was not competent—that is, serious thought—held two for observation and shipped the third directly to Earth for study. That one was intercepted by the efficient quarantine station and retained for proper dispensation. He was dead by the time the medic Officer of the Day had been notified, but Standard Operating Procedure had been upheld to the letter of the death certificate. Autopsy revealed the cause: malfunction of vital tissues owing to insufficient temperature. The body’s natural regulatory mechanism had lapsed. No cause for that had been determined.

  “A month later over half of the colony’s 2,000 person complement was dead, and more were dying. The planet was quarantined. Earth shipped supply capsules, charging their cost against the colony’s Earthside performance bond, but refused to accept any person or anything from the settlement itself. Thirty-six days after the onset—officially fixed at the moment of the first victim’s initial shakes—ten additional men and women suffered the warning siege and set their affairs in order, each in the manner befitting himself and his religion. On the following day no new cases were reported; nor were any on the days thereafter. The ten recovered, and the epidemic (for so it was then regarded) was over, as mysteriously as it had commenced. The colony was held in quarantine for five years, during which time it accumulated a debt it would take a century to exonerate, but there was no recurrence, either there or anywhere else.

  “Fifteen years later the chill broke out again, however, at a colony twenty-five light-years distant from the first. The pattern was identical, with the exception that the authorities alertly slapped on the quarantine within hours of the first death. Half the pioneers had been fatally infected within thirty-six days; the rest lived. Humanity breathed a collective sigh of relief when no contagion was detected.

  “Now the debate of the first century § raged hotly over the chill. What was it? How did it spread? For the first question there was no satisfactory answer. For the second there were several. One vociferous group held that the chill propagated by etheric waves traveling at the speed of light, a kind of death ray engulfing entire planets and moving on after a suitable interval to others. This was quickly labeled the Wave theory. Another leading group claimed that the contamination spread by personal contact, transmitted by some short-lived virus that rapidly mutated into impotence: specifically in thirty-six days. This was known as the Particle theory.

  “The Wavists were challenged to demonstrate just how a wave traveling at lightspeed could traverse twenty-five lightyears in just twenty years. But they rationalized that the inclining beam
emanated from some third point, twenty years closer to the first afflicted colony than to the second. They waited eagerly for a third colony to be struck, so that triangulation could locate the origin. And in turn they challenged the Particlists to explain why no member of the moon-based quarantine party had contracted the illness, since many had been exposed before the full danger was understood. And why the chill showed no abatement whatever prior to its fixed termination, if it were really mutating its steady way into oblivion. The reply was that the quarantine experts had been exceedingly careful at all times, as proven by their ability to avoid contagion by the chill; and that the chill itself abated even though the symptoms displayed by man did not. When the causative virus weakened so that it dropped below the threshold of effectiveness, the body’s natural defenses were able to repel it.

  “Five years later both theories had their trials. A third colony was struck—but because its medic had been too busy publishing the learned tracts required for tenure and promotion to keep up with the medical literature, he failed to recognize the chill until several deaths had occurred. Infected colonists by this time had visited five other planets, including Earth itself. Moon station had been bypassed. Yet not a single case appeared outside the stricken colony, though the sick travelers cooled and died in public hospitals. The Particlists strained to explain the paradoxes, and could not. One of the victims had happened to be a popular call girl who continued her practice until her clientele complained of her literal frigidity. She died; the clients lived. The particle theory had been exploded.

  “The Wavists pounced on the third coordinate with enthusiasm and triangulated for the fabled source. The third point was seventy-three light-years from the first; location was elementary. A ship of experts was dispatched. It found only empty space. If there had been a source, it had departed long since. And the disgruntled Particlists were quick to point out that a number of unaffected colonies lay between that so-called source point and the affected planets. How had those other colonies been missed? Was the wave discriminating? But in any event, the particular beam to strike the third colony could now be extrapolated. Volunteers planted themselves squarely in it—and were not affected. There was no beam, and the Wavists had been swamped.