Something bit him. He pinched at his thigh with his left Glove and brought up a Taphid. About to crush it, he changed his mind and flicked it back into the maw. Every little bit helped!
He hauled himself up, gripping the Hammer with one glove, and caught hold of a finger-thick whisker sprouting from the monster’s lip with the other. He scrambled over the dragon’s face until he stood atop its skull—and now he struck, guided by his ambient perception of the creature’s anatomy. Right at this precise point, here—
The blow sundered the heavy mantle of bone, transmitting the cruel shock to the tiny brain beneath. This organ was extraordinarily sensitive. The Midgard Serpent thrashed wildly and died.
Success! Arlo leaped off its hurtling skull and ran toward the chasm outlet. But as the monster collapsed, it exhaled a cloud of its remaining internal vapor, digestive gas that burned Arlo’s skin, suffocating him anew, and blinded him. The Taphids had been lucky to survive that corrosive atmosphere! Poison from vents near the teeth mixed with this, making the cloud completely deadly. Arlo staggered a few more steps, then collapsed.
As Thor had perished in the cloud of venom released by the dying Midgard Serpent, he thought, feeling his mental control slipping as his body died. An almost perfect parallel that could hardly have been scripted by Chthon—
But that was what Chthon wanted him to believe! As long as he did, he was doomed, as the cause of Life was doomed, and any sane compromise was doomed. He had to seek his own destiny, not a reenactment...
Then he felt the multiple bites of the Taphids. They were swarming over him, having been belched out with the last great spasm of the serpent. He lacked the vision and the strength to pick them off, and in any event they were already burrowing voraciously. What appetite! They must reproduce in the very act of eating, to consume so ravenously!
Destiny? It was too late! As Arlo’s control slipped, Bedside’s blade cut into Benjamin’s body. Benjamin grabbed Bedside’s two ears, flung him about, and shoved him against the pointing blade of the fallen scythe. Blood spurted from both men as they continued their death embrace.
Fenris the Wolf twisted his head about, orienting on his enemy by sound. His jaws snapped sideways—and caught Aton at last. One gulp, and the man had been swallowed as the two women screamed.
The sucker imbibed the remainder of the EeoO pool, leaving only a film of jelly.
The Lfa generated another spark—and this time the crevasse caught and held. Flame ballooned up to the high cross-passages, sucking in cool air, and plunged down toward the bottom vortex where the gas leaked into the dragon’s tunnel.
Arlo felt the heat incinerating his body, killing the Taphids in the process—and had a final realization. He had allowed himself to be deceived by a decoy! He should have struck, not at the dragon, but at Chthon’s killchill circuitry! Then the deadline would have been postponed, allowing him to force a compromise between Life and Death, saving them both.
With what was left of his mind, now heating in its fragile housing of bone, Arlo flung a blast of § energy directly at that delicate submechanism that was Chthon’s ultimate weapon. He could not destroy it physically, but he could alter the impedances, change the flows of current, make it into something else, neutralize it—
Chthon fought him. But Chthon, too, had been weakened. The chasm blaze was melting adjacent circuits, shorting some, interrupting others, interfering with the orderly process and feedback that was sentience. The two fading minds, animate and mineral, struggled over the killchill unit, buffeting its mechanism back and forth, while the increasing inferno sent heat through rock and passages, changing the composition of delicate diodes and resistance-sections.
Desperately, Arlo tried to demolish the structure before his own mind collapsed. As desperately, Chthon sought to trigger it off, though the guiding chill-wave had not yet arrived. As a result, it changed. It drew into itself in a kind of short circuit all the reserve powers of Chthon, coalescing about very special, potent substances, merging oxygen and fluorine in an entirely new and thorough manner, not restricted to organic material but all-inclusive, tapping violently into § without the limiting fuse of Arlo’s brain, resulting in—Phthor.
Sector Cyclopedia, §426
EPILOGUE
Phthor
Destruction
Ragnarok
First future: victory for Chthon
Cleansing the galaxy of contamination.
Second future: victory for life
Inevitably destroying its own sentience, unrestrained: the Taphid.
Third future: compromise
Failed.
Fourth future: Phthor
Otherwise known as the birth of a quasar
Most powerful explosion of a galaxy
Akin to the violence of the Creation itself.
Life and Death: all gone
Ragnarok
Destruction
Phthor.
We in the external universe observe
We note the result of victory
Or of mutual loss.
This new bright quasar shines
An example
A warning
Showing the way to the greater good
Compromise.
We record the case history
And present it here for eternity:
An example
An education.
We accede to what must be.
We: the mineral intellects of the universe.
We end our war with Life.
We renounce—Phthor.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I wrote this sequel to Chthon because the first novel had gone out of print and I wanted to put it back into print. So much for divine authorial inspiration. The publishing establishment was much the same in the 1970’s as it has ever been: resistive to the preferences of writers. They assumed that Chthon would not sell many copies, because it had already been published in mass market paperback. One publisher even put it as a matter of honor: it had a bargain with its readers never to publish anything that wasn’t new. So when my literary agent offered Chthon and Phthor as a set, DAW accepted the latter but turned down the former. We declined. However, when a better-established writer—I believe it was Gordon Dickson—made a similar offer to that publisher, it was accepted, and his “old” material was republished. So it was evident that rules that applied to me did not necessarily apply elsewhere. This was before I became a bestseller with light fantasy; then the rules changed for me too.
But we persevered, and in due course BERKLEY did accept the package, taking the old book in order to get the new one, and the two novels were published a month apart at the end of 1975. In the next dozen years, both went through several editions, doing well, and lo, Chthon outsold Phthor. So much for editorial judgment.
Given that the novel’s genesis was commercial, how was it to write? Actually, not bad. Some books I write for love, and some for money, and the odd thing is that they can turn out equivalently. What really counts is what happens within the book, once the writer gets into it. There can be surprises, and a competent writer can indeed make silk from sow’s ears. I discovered that there were a number of unfinished aspects worth pursuing. What happened to Aton and Coquina after they moved to Chthon? What about Chthon’s war of destruction with the septic slime we call life? How about a better look at those fascinating planetary caverns? Then I got into thematic material: what could follow an Oedipus story? What mythology could there be tat wasn’t Greek? Thus came Electra and Norse, and I liked them. Electra naturally complements Oedipus, a woman’s interest in her father being similar to a man’s interest in his mother and, as it turned out, a necessary stage in the life of a minionette. Norse mythology has Ragnarok, the destruction of the sides of good and evil, an especially useful concept in this case. And structure: what could match the double hexagon shape of Chthon? I settled on a Y, the fork representing the key separation of alternate futures. So I enjoyed working it all out.
In fact it tu
rned out to be quite sophisticated in some details. The Y is hardly in a class with the hexagon, and there’s not a lot of parallelism, but the devious interaction of the characters was a challenge. So was the problem of alternate futures, neither of which was worthwhile. How could I write my way out of that one? I finally figured out a positive conclusion, despite the destruction of all participants. So while I feel it is not the novel Chthon is, I remain quite satisfied with it. In fact, proofreading it a quarter century later, I found that I had forgotten whole major segments, so it was like reading some other writer’s novel, being surprised by the twists of its story. I have always tried to write the kind of fiction that I would like to read, but it’s hard to be objective about it. In this case I was able to verify that I really do like the way I write, when it has become unfamiliar. I also found that it does indeed fill out the first novel, so that the two together make a complete story.
At any rate, now the set of novels is available again, and readers can judge whether the critics are right about my writing ability degenerating ever since.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1975 by Piers Anthony
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5791-5
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Table of Contents
PHTHOR
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 Chthon
CHAPTER II Death
CHAPTER III War
CHAPTER IV Tree
Interlog
CHAPTER V Thor
CHAPTER VI Life
CHAPTER VII Phthor
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Copyright & Permissions
Piers Anthony, Phthor
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