Chthon (10 page)

The Captain kept her hand on his. “I do not need to know, Aton.”

But now he needed to tell her. “After that, Aurelius went to space. His cousin, Benjamin Five, acted as caretaker of the farm, so that the hvee would not die. Aurelius traveled to far planets, trying to forget. His ship put down for emergency repair on an unidentified planet. He—associated with a native girl, and he took her with him when they left. He brought her to Hvee.”

The Captain gazed into his troubled eyes. “It is not necessary to—”

“She stayed with him just one year—and deserted him. I suppose she returned to her backwoods planet. Aurelius did not travel again; he farmed the hvee and brought me up alone.”

“But she gave him the strength to continue—”

“She did not love him!” Aton shouted, casting off her hand. “She left him. No Hvee daughter would have done that. And I
had
no mother, real or step.”

“Perhaps she left him
because
she loved him,” the Captain said. “Could you, could you not understand that?”

“No!”—raising his hand as if to strike her—”If I ever meet that woman, I will kill her. And I claim my lineage from the Family of Ten. From the woman that was worthy. Ten!”

“So vehement!” But the Captain changed the subject. In thirty-six hours I will show you where the Taphids are delivered. Now go, quickly.”

Aton left.

Six

Four shifts later, in the cargo hold, Aton and the Captain loaded the Taphid caskets into a planetary shuttle. “No one else is going?” he inquired.

“No one else.”

Aton completed the job in silence. This strange woman would tell him what was happening soon enough. Apparently she had cleaned up the hold herself in the intervening period. The damaged caskets had been repackaged.

The little shuttle cast loose in the shadow of the mother vessel. The unwinking stars were visible through the shuttle’s port. Aton idly studied them while the Captain handled the controls, trying to guess what part of the galaxy they were in. “When I was a spaceman,” he said, referring to his recent years in the Navy, “I learned never to look at the naked stars. When you stare at them too long they are apt to burn holes in the retina.”

She snorted. “When I went to space, I learned to tell fact from fiction.”

Aton laughed. The shuttle came around the ship, into the sunlight. A hood slid over the port, protecting them from the more severe radiation and leaving only the internal screen for guidance. The Captain piloted the little ship down from orbit, into the traces of atmosphere.

“This is the Xest outpost,” she said.

“I still haven’t learned about fact and fiction. You mean there
are
such things as Xestians?”

“Xests. Everything exists, if you travel far enough,” she said. “They seldom communicate with human worlds, but the Xests may be the strongest nonhuman influence in our region of the galaxy. They happen to believe in live and let live, and they don’t need us. But this outpost is so much closer to human trade routes than to their own that they elected to do business with us. The
Jocasta
is one of several merchant ships handling private orders.”

“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

§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.