The men of Minion sat in a separate group, washing their hands and scowling. I understand, Aton thought. You performed from necessity, angry that your artistry was required, angry with your beautiful women, angry at your society. You are always angry.
At last the minionettes reset their veils and rejoined their masters. Scowls and curses faded into the dusk. Surely these women would be happy to leave this planet, to serve normal men, when the opportunity presented. Yet Malice’s motives had hardly been that simple.
One woman stood silently before the corpse in an attitude of prayer, Aton came up behind her and took her arm. This was Pink Rock’s widow.
She led him to a hut near the outskirt, and stood aside courteously for him to enter first. She had accepted the change-over without protest or surprise. She had had a man who loved her; now she had one who did not. That was all.
The dark interior smelled of fresh hay. Aton’s eyes adjusted to a room somewhat larger than anticipated, quite clean and well arranged. There was a mattress of soft grasses across the back, wide enough for two. A low table beside it supported several light fiber pillows, a candle, and a whip.
“I hunger,” he gestured peremptorily, and she fetched flat bread and flat water. He spat it out in a show of anger, and she went outside to bring replacements. “I tire,” he signaled, and she undressed him gently and led him to the mattress. She lifted his feet into place and propped him with pillows skillfully. The minionette was dutiful; the minionette was strong. Aton’s mind returned, horribly, to a similar scene. He did not want to remember it, but could not help himself. Once before he bad found himself in a confined space with a woman, a minionette. Once before he had undressed.
“Tell me your name.” He had to destroy that memory.
“Misery,” her signal answered. He heard “Malice.” He saw again the bubble confine of the asteroid lodging—the spotel. The two of them had docked the shuttle, passed directly from ship’s lock to entrance lock and on into the lush private accommodation. He had doffed his skin-tight protective suit immediately, becoming naked before her in the half-light. Malice had been quiet and mechanical—hardly the sparkling creature he had captured so recently at the Xest outpost. She did not strip.
“Do you want to know my name?” Inane conversation, hardly visible in the coming night. Anything to kill that terrible recollection!
Misery answered: “If it pleases the master to tell it.”
“Damn!” he exploded, looking at the veil, seeing the blank mask of the space suit holding her beauty from him. “You servile husk! Don’t you have any will of your own?”
He had spoken out loud, forgetting to signal; he knew no native could understand. But Misery responded with a beatific smile visible even through the dark veil.
Angry and alarmed, he tore off that veil. Had he been trapped into—
Her hair was dull, her eyes gray. She resembled more the Captain than the nymph. She was smiling still, but blankly.
I am a fool, he thought. If she had understood my spoken words, she would not have smiled. This is a native girl, trained to react to harshness with a forgiving smile.
Yet the man who loved her had been tortured to death.
“You may think of me as ‘Stone Heart’,” he said, adopting the evident custom of the planet. He was still angry, as perhaps the native men were angry—at her, at the system she represented, the enormity of it and its somber mystery. At the awful memories this situation evoked by being unfairly similar.
“Why aren’t you beautiful?” Now he was being deliberately unkind, and his anger turned against himself. Must fury beget fury?
She only smiled.
“Take off your clothing,” he ordered. He could hardly see her now. “First light the candle. I want to see you.” She obeyed slowly.
Her body was glorious. The long hair flowed over shoulders and sculptured breasts, and his eye followed the fold of the space suit as it peeled away from her narrow waist and swelling hips and thighs. Alone with her, entirely alone, for the first time.
But this is the memory! he thought. It is Misery I am looking at, not Malice! Not Malice. Not—
Not, not subject to the laws of any planet, but here, in the inviolate privacy of the spotel, the rented transitory lodging of newlyweds and wealthy travelers of space. A luxurious retreat, a luxurious body, unfettered at last.
Misery!
I love you, Malice, and you are mine.
Misery!
Why don’t you respond, Malice?
Memory…
Why are you silent?
Malice…
Why have you withdrawn? Are you ill? Malice, Malice…
But she was in radiant health, hair burning, burning, eyes never so deep; natural, normal, except that she seemed to have no awareness of him.
Speak to me!
She would not. What unseen hand had placed a spell upon her, made her mute, in the hour of triumph? Had some post-hypnotic state been invoked, some command inflicted by an unknown enemy intent on his destruction? Was it now his duty to break her out of it, a sleeping beauty, with a single splendid kiss?
He kissed her, but she did not wake to him. Her lips were mushy, unresponsive.
Or was a greater effort required? Should he make love to her?
When he had not yet given her the hvee?
He took her in his arms, one elbow beneath her shoulders, the other under her knees, carried her limp body to the couch, and spread it out.
Misery! With a terrible shock Aton wrenched himself back to the present. Misery lay on the straw pallet, nude and lovely, open to the caress of his hands. He had thought his Malice to be unique, but here was a duplicate form, one of dozens in this village alone, and hundreds, thousands on the planet. He had mistaken the standard attributes of the species for beauty, duping his emotion all his life.
Misery smiled again, twisting her body in pleasure. How strange that this woman, the one he did not desire, reacted so positively to his careless touch, while Malice…
Malice—was it amnesia? Yet she showed no distress, no alarm, no confusion. She saw him, recognized him—as an article of furniture, not as a man. She was not catatonic, nor did she collide with him when she moved.
Could her love for him have failed? Had it ever existed at all? Her bright hair and measureless eyes denied both. Her love was strong. It had to be for him; the minionette did not glow in the company of the wrong man. She would never have come with him, without love.
She had been a captain in space, enormously capable. Never would she do a thing without excellent reason. There had to be a motive. Did she know something that he did not? Something that she was unable to tell him?
He had a vision of the elemental drama for children: behind the lock there stands a criminal, blaster in hand, about to rob and ravish the heroine. At the entrance is her lover: muscular, handsome, intelligent. But if she makes known her plight, that lover will be the first to die. And so she must be silent, and try to signal to him in some manner that the hidden intruder will not intercept. If she is able to convey the message, however obscurely, the resolution is assured.
Malice lay exposed, arm hanging down, legs gently spread, astonishingly lovely. Her breathing was regular, her eyes closed.
Where was the villain? The airlock had borne the unbroken seal of the proprietor. There could be no third party here, not on an isolated airless asteroid, pressurized only upon their entry. There could be no secret monitoring device, no remote-control threat. Privacy, above all else, was what the proprietors sold. YOU CAN DEPEND ON PRIVACY AT THE SPOTEL, the company advertised, and it had the means to protect its reputation.
Malice lay passive. The mystery was deeper than that… and he could not bring himself to perform an act upon a mannequin. He was baffled.
His mental censor balked. Memory would not go further. Relieved, he returned his full attention to Misery.
Her hair, in the candlelight, was brighter now. This woman, if he understood the si
gns, was learning to love him already—and all he had done was to aggravate her. Suddenly he felt remorse, felt warm respect for her suffering.
Misery recoiled.
This time he had neither signaled nor spoken, yet she had reacted. The minionette was telepathic! He had suspected this before; why had he forgotten? She could read his thoughts, or at least, his emotions, and was responding to these, not his words.
There remained one oddity.
Aton gathered his mental forces and sent a blast of emotional ferocity at her, hate and fury as sheer as he could make them.
Surprised pleasure lighted her features. She bounced up, caught his shoulders, pressed herself against him, kissed him passionately.
Her emotions were inverted! His hate was her love!
Things fell into place: the villainy of the little man on the road, the response to any male irritation. And Malice—she had been most affectionate when he was angry or miserable, and cold when he felt romantic. No wonder she had been impossible to get along with!
Misery was close to him, her hair brightening by the instant. He hit her. She rocked with the force of the blow, smiling dazzlingly. He grasped her flaming tresses and brought her roughly to him, smiting her with hate. She leaped to meet his savage kiss. He bit her soft lip, hard, to bring blood; she moaned with pleasure and did not bleed.
Aton locked an arm over her neck, pinning her securely. Then he brought to mind an image of gentle fields of hvee, the waiting love overflowing, selflessly desiring an object.
Misery twisted and struggled, her face a mask of pain. “Yes,” he said, “it hurts you, doesn’t it? How much more would it hurt if I were to love you, yourself, not just the hvee?” A strangled cry broke from her.
He held her still, though she was very strong. “Don’t you see, Misery—I’m actually being more sadistic than you can imagine. I know it hurts you to be near love—therefore I hurt you most by loving you. And you must return with joy the love of the man who hurts you most.”
She ceased her struggles and looked up at his face with confusion. She could not understand his spoken words, but the mood behind them was devastating.
“I will have mercy on you,” he continued, not releasing her. “I will spare you, as my darling did not spare me. Because I cannot directly feel your emotion, not in the sense you can feel mine. Because you cannot comprehend the paradox of your make-up. Because I know the sincerity of your intent, and the necessity of your widowhood. Because I want to make you happy in the brief time available to me. I shall reward you by taking out on you all the fury I feel for what your sister has made of me.
“I’m going to kill you, Misery.”
He took her head in his powerful hands, hooking his fingers in her ears, and twisted. She smiled. His muscles jumped as he wrenched, trying to break her neck, but slowly. She gave herself up to the luxury of it. She was like a doll, limp, pliable, unbelievably tough underneath. Then the fury took him, and he drove her head against the mattress as though to tear it off and bury it by brute force.
It was a long, long time before, exhausted, he realized that bare hands, no matter how capable, were insufficient to kill the minionette. She was a creature of punishment; she was made for this; she delighted in it.
Aton rested, defeated, her body warm against his, caressing him, loving him. He had not been able to expunge that which was in him.
Would a knife pierce that seemingly fragile flesh? He was afraid to find out. The whip, well worn, had left no sign on her body.
But there were other mysteries. All the minionettes were cast from a single mold; all responded to the sadistic love inversion, while the men appeared to be normal. But he had seen no old women. Could they all be young?
“How long do you live, Misery?” This time the signal.
She tried to answer him. “There is no limit—”
“You are immortal?”
“No.”
“How do you die?”
“When there is pain, too much, it kills.”
And our love is your pain, he thought. As long as a man hates you, you live and grow more beautiful and your hair flames. But when he is kind to you, when he loves you, you die.
Yet it had been Pink Rock who had died, not his woman.
“Do you know the meaning of love?” he asked her.
“Oh, yes, it is my being. I love—”
“Did you love Pink Rock?”
“Yes—he was good, at first. But we had no son. Then his mind became twisted, and he hurt me. I might have made him love me again, if they had not taken him away.”
Of course. The minionette was tough. She would not expire in simple feminine helplessness. If a man began to “hurt” her, she would try to cure the pain by recapturing his original attitude. She would, in fact, do everything in her considerable power to make him, by male definition, hate her. The men of Minion could hardly allow that. The line between love and hate might seem narrow to some, but it could also be appallingly wide—wide as the chasm of Chthon. For who could say in what manner that terrible emotion might manifest itself, before it settled on the intended object?
The men of Minion were wise. They understood the devastation lying stored beneath the careless torch of uncontrolled emotion. They took the necessary and merciful step, and extinguished it before the minionette acted. They were kind, in their fashion—they tried to give the man back his natural hate before he died, to take with him to his spirit world.
The civilization of the greater galaxy was not so wise. It envisioned mercy as abstinence from death. It recognized the inherent danger of the love of the minionette, but preferred to ship the victim to the eternal prison of Chthon, rather than perform the execution directly.
But even Chthon could not contain the evil of that love. How many there had died?
Why had Malice come into the galaxy? How? What had made her seek him out? Why had she enticed his young love, love that must have tortured her from the beginning? She would have been better off without him, secure in her position in the Merchant Service. Or on her home world, where men understood.
His brain knew the answer, but would not yield it to consciousness. She had told him, there at the—
“Misery—was Pink Rock’s love stronger than mine, before he changed?”
“No, Stone Heart. Your love is the strongest. More than any man.”
Because I am of the galaxy. Because I am a member of a species not conditioned to the minionette. What a rare treat, when a woman of this planet escapes into the galaxy, where every man feels his feelings with naïve strength. Where, unaware of the telepathic linkage, his every confused nuance of anger and pain sears his imagination.
Yes, my emotion is strong. The sensitive hvee responded to it and grew for me in my childhood, and Malice understood that potential—and something else—when she encountered that little boy on that pastoral world. She made her sacrifice and cast her fine net over that boy, and sent him away before the burgeoning sensation became too much for her. She knew that my love was not for her, not then, though it tempted her sorely. I was then a harmless dalliance, a moment of anticipation, not ready for harvest.
Not until I sought her out, torn by such frustration and such doubt from the fruitless search that she was unable to resist. She tried to savor me secretly, close but disguised. Until the Xest picture penetrated the Captain and revealed the minionette…
…And doomed us both.
“Come, Misery,” he said. “I will inflict on you a love you’ve never dared dream of before.”
§400
10
Ninety-nine men and a hundred and forty-two women began the terrors of the Hard Trek. Not with courage and boldness, not seeking destiny with consummate determination; but frightened, desperate, driven—driven by the certain knowledge of hunger and pain behind.
The revolution of the lower caverns had been betrayed, and every one of them had to pay the price of failure. No food came down from the upper caverns any more. Tally’s
people had ample reserves, many stones hoarded for just such an emergency: they would not relent.
The fragment of Framy’s blue garnet might have purchased time, had it been known to exist before. Instead, it was proof of doom, showing that they had denied what the upper cavern leaders had known to be truth. The revolt had never had a chance, in the face of that; it had been no more than a convenient pretext to abolish the entire nether population.
The trek began with fatalism. No one could doubt that the majority would soon be dead, and not cleanly.
The legend of Doc Bedside guided them. He had set off five years before, downwind, homemade pack and kit bound to his wiry body, a sharp stone in his hand. He had disappeared into the land of the chimera and never been heard from again—until Aton brought the confirmation that he had won through. Bedside had emerged the other side of sanity—but could such madness take two hundred and forty-one experienced and fore-warned travelers? They followed his route, searching for the tokens of his passing, if they existed; it would be easier, this second time.
They were wrong, of course.
Aton marched in the vanguard for ten hours, or what he thought of as that length of time, following the spacious caverns and passages up a gentle but steady incline. The walls spread farther apart, the ceiling grew higher; as the space increased, the wind diminished and cooled. The journey became almost pleasant. But for the total lack of food, the outer caverns were far better for human residence than the ones they had known.
They rested for an estimated six hours, hungry bellies growling. No one stood guard. Everyone had to travel together, and the fearsome pit creatures never approached so large a party. Almost, they hoped for an attack—because concerted action might trap and bring down even the chimera, and there was sure to be meat on its body. Starvation would halt the journey at its beginning unless something edible was located soon. Bedside must have eaten from the caverns.
On the third march the first people collapsed from exhaustion and hunger. They were methodically butchered and eaten.
Aton stood in the faltering circle as Bossman showed the way: he severed the warm limbs with his axe as other men pulled them away from the trunk of the first corpse. The blood spattered and covered the blade, poured over the stone floor, thickened as it flowed morbidly back down the trail they had taken.