Chthon

  She stepped back from him, once more silhouetted against the midmorning sky. She was radiant. “So new,” she said. “So beautiful. Kiss me, Aton, so I can believe….”

  He put his two hands on her shoulders, bringing her close slowly. As her face approached a cloud seemed to pass before it. A shimmering, a fading…

  …And it was the face of the minionette. Hair the color of the living flame surrounded it, twining in serpentine splendor, in and out. Black-green eyes stared into his. The red lips parted. “Kiss me, Aton…”

  “No!” he cried, his dream of freedom blasted. He put his hand against the specter, covering the liquid eyes. He shoved it away with a convulsion of horror.

  And stood alone on the mountain, wrapped in the melody….

  “But Love has pitched his mansion in

  The place of excrement.”

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop”

  Interlog:

  These are not our people.

  The universe was clean in its conception:

  Bright pure suns swept up the swirling dust,

  Nebulae drifted eternally—until one fell from grace.

  Our galaxy is ill:

  It rots at the core, dissolves into decay, festers with putrid stench,

  Diseased by the ultimate horror:

  Life.

  From this morass rises an unthinkable caricature of intellect,

  Dedicating itself to the greater decimation of order,

  Contaminating every particle.

  Its guises are several, but our concern is with the nearest:

  Man.

  These are not our people.

  The enemy is man.

  This evil must be expunged, our galaxy sterilized.

  No vestige of slime may remain.

  Yet—the malady is far advanced;

  The infection has greater resource than we.

  Prematurity is defeat.

  We control our revulsion; we study and are subtle.

  We recruit the envoys of man’s doom from his own ranks.

  We select an individual and tame him to fit our purpose.

  This creature is less than sane

  (His culture says),

  He is ideal:

  Aton.

  Aton has a dream of union

  Aton longs to embrace beauty

  Aton seeks to murder evil…

  Aton, Aton, child of illusion,

  “Fair and foul are near of kin.”

  Your strength rises from evil.

  Look to your excrement;

  Smear your face in truth

  Forget ambition;

  Return.

  For these are not your people—

  And we are not their god.

  IV. Minion

  §401

  Ten

  It was bright, blindingly bright, even in the heavy shade. Aton had forgotten how much natural incandescence was wasted in the open. The smell of the outdoors was everywhere, rich and ecstatic. It was day and it was warm, not with the arid blast of the caverns, but with sweetness, with splendor.

  Freedom! Nightmare was behind him now, his long trial over. The insane evil of the caverns could fade into the past, leaving only the Aton who had won free—the purged Aton, the clean Aton.

  There were trees and grasses and open ground. The man who had conquered Chthon and kept his sanity dropped to his knees, not in any prayer of thanks, but to grasp physically at the renewed wonder of it all. His pale fingers dug into the soft turf, pleasure running up his arms; he brought a handful to his mouth, tasting the torn green of it and the fresh decay.

  There is no filth in nature, he thought. There is no horror that does not originate in man’s own mind.

  He rolled on the ground, transported by the joys of familiarity. He knew this planet—it was as though there had been no dark interlude between his murder of Coquina’s love and the present wonder, as though all of Chthon had not intervened to avenge that crime.

  I loved you, pretty shell. But it was my second love, smaller than the first. And so I freed you.

  A noise in the afternoon brought him out of his reverie. It had been morning when he emerged. His attention focused: the sound had been the report from the activation of an ancient projectile mechanism. A—shot. As a boy, he had once heard… someone was—hunting.

  The associations were promising. A man who could indulge such antique tastes could also afford a private ship. He was likely to be eccentric, a loner.

  But if this were a private game preserve, as seemed likely now, Aton himself could be in immediate danger. A number of exotic predators could have been stocked. He had been very foolish to let down his guard merely because he was free.

  It would be best to overpower the hunter immediately and take his ship. That would solve his problem of transportation, since he could take off without having to conceal his identity from local officials.

  He made his way toward the original sound, moving as quietly as possible. He was used to the rigid rock floor of the caverns, and his feet were calloused and insensitive from the eternal twilight marches. Brittle twigs seemed to project themselves magically under his toes, breaking vociferously. Surely his approach was audible for a mile or more!

  He would have to wait for the man instead, hoping that his wanderings brought him within range.

  In range of what? Aton had no weapon, and chance would scarcely bring the man within arms’ reach. He was still thinking in cavern terms.

  Quietly he felt for fragments of stone, collecting them in a little pile at his ankles. He stood behind a slender red tree, sidewise: it would appear to be too small to conceal a man, and his position for throwing was good. There had been only one shot—the man must have fired for practice, or at a mistaken target. Nervous, perhaps. Good.

  Aton threw his largest stone in a high arc that intercepted no branches during its ascent. It came down noisily fifty yards from his tree—away from the hunter. The man should pass very near, on his way to investigate. The first stone would have to be accurate, even so; a projectile weapon, properly used, could be as deadly as a knife.

  The quarry began to whistle tunelessly, approaching. Did the fool expect to stalk an animal that way? There would be no point in reasoning with such an idiot. Best simply to kill him and backtrack to the ship. Aton could handle any conventional model.

  The whistling grew louder. Aton raised his arm, flexing his wrist comfortably. He would have to expose himself momentarily; it was too risky to aim by the sound alone.

  The whistling stopped. “I should advise you,” a scratchy voice said, “that my old-fashioned rifle has an old-fashioned heat perceptor. If you are sapient, act accordingly.”

  The tree would protect him somewhat. The hunter would not dare to approach too close, and could not gain anything by circling. But neither could Aton hope to overcome him, since he had lost the advantage of surprise. He would have to parley.

  “Sapient,” he called. “Truce.”

  “I’ll hold my fire,” the voice agreed, “as long as I think it wise. I’m not a very good shot, anyway—more likely to hit the stomach than the heart.” The warning was plain enough: this man would shoot to maim rather than to kill.

  Aton accepted the warning and put down his stones before stepping into view. He had no desire to experience the niceties of “poor” marksmanship. The hunter was less foolish than anticipated.

  The hunter was short, slightly built, and middle-aged. Small, very bright eyes peered out from a deeply creased and sallow face. The hands, too, were yellow, the flesh sunken between tendons, the nails coarse and too long. But the vintage rifle those hands held was absolutely steady, and it bore unwaveringly upon Aton’s midsection. This was no pampered sportsman.

  The hunter was giving Aton a similar perusal. “When you return to nature, you certainly go all out,” he said at last. Aton suddenly remembered: they wore clothing outside, and he was naked from being in the caverns. His hair was filth
y and inches long on every side; his beard was matted over chin and chest, tangled with bits of grass. His own skin was deathly pale, except where the dirt encrusted it.

  “You have the look of a fugitive,” the man continued. “I wondered why it never occurred to you to parley honestly, instead of foolishly trying to ambush an armed man. Perhaps I should immolate you now, before you reverse the opportunity.”

  The man was toying with his quarry. He could not suspect Aton’s true situation, since no one outside the prison knew its location. No one except Aton himself. If this man had suspected it, he would have shot Aton immediately.

  Or would he? He was watching Aton now, those frighteningly capable hands caressing the polished stock of his rifle. Did he suspect that Chthon had an outlet here? Did he know the nature of the innocent cave that led into the bowels of the planet, but lack the ultimate proof—proof that would kill him long before he could return to the surface? Did he search now not for stocked animals, but for the one creature that could tell him the secret of that unimaginable wealth, and lead him safely into Chthon?

  With what interminable patience had he prowled this forest, year after year, searching for—Aton?

  This man would have to die.

  “Yes, I see you understand,” the hunter said. “You and I will go to the cave, and you will prove your origin there—or die. Will it be necessary to demonstrate my ability to make you perform?”

  “You have no ability,” Aton said, not bothering to deny what the man seemed to know. “You cannot trust me, and you would be at my mercy—there.”

  The man smiled, and even Aton felt cold. “You do not know me well enough.”

  Only once had Aton met defeat in combat, and seldom had he known fear, but he was afraid of this man now. He put a hand to his mouth and spat out a garnet.

  The other person’s eyes narrowed appreciatively. “I might reconsider, in the face of your argument. You have more?”

  Aton nodded.

  “Hidden in the forest?”

  Another nod.

  “Your stones may bring me down after all, since those are what I came for. Do you know what a coded ship is?”

  Aton knew. It meant that no one could handle the ship except the registered owner. All mechanisms locked automatically unless manipulated by the touch of the coded individual. He could not take the ship.

  “I want more than the few garnets you may have brought,” the man said. “I want the mines. All I needed immediately was the proof that you can lead me to them, and you have given it. You and I will be partners—rather wealthy ones, in time.”

  “What shall I call you, partner?” Aton asked. The little ship was spaceborne, the clouded ball of Chthon’s planet diminishing gently behind. Seeing it in the screen, Aton was reminded of the seeming incongruity of accelerating to escape velocity, only to decelerate to galactic norm once free of the planet. But this was necessary in order to phase in the § drive. Three hours ago they had traveled at a single mile per hour, relative to the normal motion of this portion of the galaxy, and actually appeared to be falling back into the independently orbiting planet. Now their speed was a thousand times that, and soon would surpass anything possible through chemical means. The § drive could not be used on the surface of a planet, of course, since the initial motion was erratic and wrong.

  The man’s eyes clouded at Aton’s question, betraying polarized contact lenses. “That will do nicely,” he said.

  ” ‘Partner’? As you wish. I am Aton Five. You must understand that no power can send me back to Chthon until my business outside is finished. Show me that you can help me in that, before you trust me to cooperate with your designs.” What a pompous snot I seem—but this principle of mutual distrust is unreliable, he thought.

  “Understood. By the time you know what I offer, you will be eager to join me. There is time, and I am at your service.” But the grim mystery of the man remained. Aton had no interest in the wealth of Chthon, and had no intention of returning, but could risk neither killing nor deserting Partner until he learned more of the man’s capabilities. Meanwhile, business should be conducted on an innocuous level.

  “I’ll buy a planet from you,” Aton said, meaning that he would turn over another garnet for information about its location, and transportation there.

  Partner reached for the Sector Index, a volume about the size and texture of Aton’s lost LOE. This covers most of the human sector—two million stars or so. I never charge for public information.”

  Aton took the book but did not open it. “I can’t use this.”

  “You don’t know Galactic Coordinates? I thought you were a spaceman. That system is pre-§. Centuries old. But there are always the maps.”

  “I know the system. But I don’t think the planet I want is listed here.”

  “Of course not. These are stars. You have to use the subsector ephemerides for the planetary orbits. But why bother? They’ll message the information to you when you pull into the system.”

  “This is a proscribed planet,” Aton said sourly.

  Partner looked at him again, pupils momentarily colorless as the lenses shifted. “You do have a problem. You know where we’ll have to go first.”

  Aton knew.

  Eleven

  Earth: home of humanity and of its legends for ten thousand times the time that race had been in space, and more; whose population thrust forth a hundred million human bodies to space in each sidereal year, and did not diminish—until the catastrophic chill imposed de facto quarantine upon the mother world. One month—to wipe out forty per cent of all its inhabitants, to bring the fusion bombs necessary to cremate the mountainous offal in the wake of that brief siege. Even so, Earth retained a population more massive than the rest of its empire combined, and still her lands and seas and atmosphere were crowded with carpets of living flesh.

  Not even the chill could solve this problem.

  But Earth had power. She was the irrevocable queen of a billion cubic parsecs of space, not through military, economic, or moral force, but through her surpassing knowledge. Here was technology beyond the rustic imagination of the colony worlds. Here was accumulated information of such detail and range that storage and referencing alone usurped the facilities of a small continent. Here was the Sector Library.

  Computers organized and sorted the unthinkable complex, delivering any information known to man, to any party, in moments. A man had only to enter a booth and make known his desire.

  Unless it was proscribed.

  But there were the “stacks”—comprehensive files of printed documentation, of interest to hardly one seeker in a thousand, but sustained by ancient custom in the face of rising opposition. Some year the renewed pressure of population would abolish this monstrous relic. Meanwhile, it endured. Dedicated ancients maintained the archives in leisurely exactitude, and interest was the sole criterion for admission. Earth was after all free, and upheld the right of every person to search for knowledge and to discover as much as determination and ingenuity could provide. And the information was there, all of it—if the seeker could find it. The very awkwardness of the stacks created this advantage: the archives were far too cumbersome to purge selectively. They could not be expurgated.

  The stacks occupied cubic miles of space. Never had Aton encountered an enclosure of such dimension: two hundred tiers of long, low hallways, each lined from floor to ceiling on either side with thick volumes, each extending so far into the distance that the walls seemed to meet. At regular intervals right-angled crosswalks cut off segments, making intermittent alternate passages whose staccato lengths also pressed into distant closure. Aton imagined that he could see the ponderous curve of the planet in the level flooring, and that it was the horizon that terminated the halls.

  Chthon itself lost its novelty within these passages. Ever did the works of nature, he thought, bow before the works of man.

  But how to start? Every volume looked the size of LOE—forty million words of print. Every
shelf was tightly packed, with only occasional blanks: three books to the foot, six shelves to the wall, two walls to the hall. A ten-foot section of one hall would contain 360 books—more than fourteen billion words.

  Aton was not a rapid reader in either Galactic or English. A solid day of intensive effort would get him through no more than a tiny fraction of a single volume. He would be here for decades, merely finishing what was in sight, no matter how he rushed. If he skimmed, he would run the risk of missing a vital clue.

  He began to understand why these files were not restricted. Only by the wildest of blunders could a person come across dangerous information—if he recognized it when he saw it. Only through the computer could the library be used effectively.

  Partner, always at his elbow, had been studying him. “You’ve never see a library before?”

  “I thought I had.” But there had been librarians who listened to the problem and flounced off to generate a collection of books in some undefined manner. Never—this.

  “Accept some advice, then. You do not visit the stacks to read, any more than you go to space to look at a vacuum. You research. You set up coordinates and adjust your course (I’m talking about space at the moment) and ignore what doesn’t concern you. You can’t locate your planet by blind reading here any more than you could do it by looking out the port at sublight to find it in space.