Phthor (13 page)

“Caterpillars? Potwhales? Dragons? Chimeras?” she retorted derisively. “Innocent? What about that wolf thing that laid me open?” She paused, reflecting. “Actually, that was sort of fun. You know, we minionettes are almost unkillable by normal means, but that thing—I’d like to meet it again.”

Arlo remembered the massive malevolence of the wolf. “You have a death wish,” he said. “Bitch or bride, I don’t want you dead. I’ll help the Amazons track it down and kill it.”

“As you wish,” she said diffidently.

He reached for her, but she avoided him, responsive to his positive emotion. “Remember, I’m your sister!” she reminded him teasingly. “Your culture says you shall not raise your penis to me.”

“Hell with my culture, sister!” he cried, grabbing for her leg.

“Sister!” It was Aton’s voice.

Aton and Doc Bedside stood at the entrance to this bright inlet, blinking in the daylight illumination of the high gas jets. Arlo had never expected such a visitation—but of course Bedside could guide Aton in safely, if it were Chthon’s will.

There was about to be another facet of the Chthon/minionette struggle.

“As I informed you,” Bedside said to Aton. “Your daughter—by your mother.”

Aton stared—and Vex stood up straight, smoothing her flanks, inhaling. Her figure had filled out completely now, and except for her short hair and certain human touches, she was every inch a minionette. Even the hair showed it, for it formed a crown of rolling flame.

“My daughter...” Aton said, his eyes fixed on Vex. “So like Malice...”

Arlo stood still, watching it unfold. What was his father going to do? Kill the minionette? Arlo could not allow that. Obviously Bedside had done it to get rid of Vex. The revelation of her relation to Arlo had not eliminated her, so now the battle had been widened to include Aton, who had killed Vex’s mother. By loving her.

“An abomination!” Aton said. “That she should come here to tempt my son—”

Arlo raised his blowgun, uncertain whether he had the courage to use it against his father. But Vex took more direct action. She walked across the path into Aton’s arms. “Father!” she said passionately.

Arlo saw his father’s hands clench as though to crush her. Again he raised the blowgun. But he remembered how very difficult the minionette was to kill. Barehanded, Aton could not do it. The stronger his hate, the less chance he stood.

Then Aton kissed his daughter. Vex kissed him back. By appearance alone, they were an ideal couple, and Arlo knew in that moment how Aton had been with Malice. This was as close a duplication as possible.

Doc Bedside appeared at Arlo’s side. “You realize, of course, where this will lead,” he said.

“No!” Arlo said angrily.

“He hates her—but he loves her, as you do. For she is Electra, and he is dead because of her mother.”

Arlo shook his head. “What?”

“Electra, in Greek legend, was the daughter of Agamemnon and Queen Clytemestra. The Queen killed her husband, and Electra was so outraged that she hid her young brother Orestes from the Queen’s wrath, and enabled him to grow up to avenge his father. Later, the Electra complex was designated as a girl’s sexual love for her father, in competition with her mother. It is in many ways parallel to the Oedipus complex: a boy’s sexual love for his mother. How fitting that Aton should enact both roles.”

“Both?” Arlo was still bemused.

“The mode of the minionette is of course Oedipal, with the woman mating, successively, her spouse, son, grandson, and so on down the line. But—”

“I know this!” Arlo snapped.

“But when she passes, she leaves a daughter to carry on—and naturally that young girl’s attraction is to her family line. She thus is the willing consort of her father, the first man in her life and her nearest of kin. By him she bears his successor. And so Electra complements Oedipus in a beautiful, continuing relationship. It will be so satisfying to see it enacted here—don’t you agree?”

Slowly the awful concept hammered its way through Arlo’s skull. Bedside had hinted at it before: the father took precedence over the son, until the son killed the father in the recurring Oedipal pattern. This was the hell Vex had brought into their lives. “My father—the minionette...”

Suddenly Aton threw Vex aside, cursing. She fell to the floor and lay unmoving, though of course she was not hurt.

“Naturally he resists the concept much more violently than you do,” Bedside continued. “He was raised on Planet Hvee and received the finest galactic tutoring. He has civilized reservations. He knows it is forbidden—knows it right down through his subconscious. Which means he is genuinely, violently angry about the temptation. That of course makes him doubly attractive to the minionette. See how she lures him.”

Indeed, Vex presented a remarkably fetching picture of romantic innocence, half-supine on the floor, legs spread, palms flat against the stone to her right, arms supporting her twisting shoulders so that her breasts hung partly forward, her head drooping. Never had she been more lovely, this angel in distress.

Aton whirled and strode into the darkness of the tunnel, almost radiating fury.

“He will return,” Bedside said. “Inevitably—for she is his daughter, child of his beloved mother, the minionette.”

“But she is my betrothed...” Arlo whispered. “The minionette is always true.”

“True to her nature,” Bedside said. “True to her closest kin. You are her half-brother, only quarter-minion. Aton is her father, half-minion. He is the one.”

Arlo looked at Vex and saw her looking after Aton. He knew he had lost her. No human law or scruple could prevail against the combined tides of minion blood and minion nature. “What remains for me?” he asked Bedside, almost as if in this extremity the mad doctor were his friend.

“Chthon loves you,” Bedside said. “Chthon sought to spare you this. Chthon can fulfill you.”

“As a zombie?” Arlo flashed.

“As a god.”

Arlo, his heart numbed, acceded—as he knew his father had before him, when Coquina was dying. Doc Bedside had prevailed again, this time destroying Coquina and perhaps the whole thrust of Life’s invasion. But Arlo hardly cared. “Chthon was always my friend,” he said.

“Always!” Bedside agreed warmly.

Chapter IV:
   
Tree

Doc Bedside conducted Arlo to an unfamiliar section of the caverns where the stone was a strange gray, with portions bare of glow. The passages diverged and rediverged in grotesque loops, and there was no wind at all. Stagnant pools filled the declivities, and the glow had settled in them, providing what scant light there was. This, surely, was a place of dying. The normal small sounds of cavern animals were absent.

“This is the lowest portion of the caverns that man has trodden,” Doc Bedside said. “See, there is my marker.” He indicated a cairn, a pile of stones. Beside it was the crude outline of a human skull, scratched in the soft rock of the floor. Beneath that were four jagged letters: MYXO. “Undisturbed these thirty years. I made that as a warning for any fools who might follow, back in §395.”

“But the myxo can strike anywhere,” Arlo said. “It is Chthon’s weapon, his zombie-device.”

“Back then, Chthon was just developing it,” Bedside said. “I was Chthon’s first human subject.”

“But you’re not a zombie.” Arlo paused, reconsidering. “Not completely.”

Bedside smiled. “I am half-zombie, half-mad, halfhuman. Chthon overlaps my madness, so all you witness is near-normality. You will comprehend my rationale shortly.”

“I don’t want to be like you!” Arlo protested. “Or like the Norns.”

“On the failures of the past are built the successes of the future. The zombies are complete failures; Verthandi the Norn and I are half-failures. Your father might have been a success, but in the end resisted too strongly. Your brother Aesir was closer yet.”

“So you killed him,” Arlo said.

Bedside’s composure was momentarily broken. “How would you know of that?” he asked tightly.

“Uncle Benjamin told me.”

“You never met Benjamin!”

“No?” Arlo did not choose to explain about the vision. “He said you were jealous of Aesir, who was closer to Chthon than you were, so you killed him. How can I be sure you won’t kill me, too?”

Bedside slumped, very much the way Coquina had when she told him about the minionette. “I did kill him—and suffered the double vengeance of Benjamin and Chthon. I need no further lessons of that nature.”

Mad as he might be, Bedside always spoke truth. “What happened?”

“The cavern creatures all loved him, for he was beloved of Chthon. None would harm him. But I initiated a game, a blind hunt, and in their confusion they destroyed him. Yet Chthon became aware, though I had not touched him myself, and Chthon put me into a caterpillar...”

“Sleipnir!”

“It is not a process I recommend. I assure, you I would kill you only if Chthon directed it. I am the servant, not the master, not the chosen. You will not be like me; you will be the first living chthonic god. Chthon does not need or desire any more partial successes. You must believe that, or this is useless. You must come to Chthon voluntarily, with no reservation in your mind or soul.”

“I can’t be sure of that,” Arlo said. “I’d have to know what I was getting into.” Chthon was his friend—but there were limits to friendship.

“Chthon will show you. Your mind will not be touched, only your perceptions. Then you will return to your garden, alone, where you will meditate upon the options with full knowledge. Thereafter, you will walk either to the claws of the minionette, knowing how that must end, or to the comfort of Chthon.”

“Nice phrasing, that,” Arlo remarked dryly.

“Phrase it as you will. Your choice will be free.” Bedside’s words were augmented by a mental projection from Chthon, doubling and more than doubling the effect.

“I believe it,” Arlo agreed. “Chthon has always been fair with me. How do we proceed?”

“Lie here. Be comfortable, relaxed. Open your mind to Chthon,” Bedside said. “Do not resist; Chthon is your friend. Chthon will assuage your wounds.”

Arlo lay on the rock. It was not uncomfortable, for he had often slept on stone before. His gaze traveled to the ceiling. Above him was a massive stalactite, crystalline, translucent at the fringe: It resembled, in it gross fashion, an open hvee flower. From it a thin mist descended, like that of the gas crevasse. Was he now to discover what happened in the suffocating depths of that chasm? To be sucked through a network of pipes to be consumed in the flames? Would his essence emerge as a precious blue garnet , forever inaccessible ?

No. He trusted Chthon. More than he trusted the minionette!

Arlo opened his mind. And it was like walking down a long dark tunnel. Yet, as he traveled down it, the way became opaque. The walls wavered and his footing became unsteady. “Relax; let the irrelevancies bubble off,” Bedside said from somewhere outside. “You are seeking to extricate yourself from the prison of your senses. Let the body go. Don’t force it. Just let it pass in its own way.”

Arlo relaxed—and the tunnel in his imagination firmed. He walked down it to meet his friend and god directly. Now a light manifested far ahead, and he knew that light was Chthon.

As he went, the way became easier, the obstacles fewer and less formidable. The tunnel widened and finally opened

out in a vista of dazzling beauty. It was an explosion. From a pinpoint source, bright plasma thrust outward in a multidimensional sphere. Fire-radiation and matter-smoke, like the hair of a loving minionette, it expanded at an awesome velocity.

“This is the nascent universe,” a voice said. “Eclat quintessential.”

And it was. Arlo had never imagined such splendor. He watched it blossom, form rifts and internal swirls, fragments. The fragments sundered in turn, their main parts coalescing and turning, swirling, throwing off sparks of matter in the form of gas. Glowing segments developed, thousands of them, millions, filling the universe with their secondary light. Then these faded, becoming smaller as their aggregate formations became larger. Motes appeared within them as they paled.

“Quasars,” the voice said. “Prototype galaxies—masses of energy and gas, forerunners of more solid matter.”

“I don’t understand!” Arlo protested. But how he wanted to!

The focus centered on one quasar. It wavered and changed as it spun through the great emptiness around it: chaos without and within. Parts of it were fire, and parts were ice; where they met they steamed and hissed and formed into—a giant man.

But the giant died and fell apart, and his flesh tumbled into soil, his bones became stones and mountains, and his hair took on independent life and became vegetation. His blood ran out and pooled into a great sea, turning green. His skull exploded, the dome of it forming the sky; his brains became clouds.

Maggots bred in the decaying hulk, ancestral Taphids, and these stood up and showed themselves as animal life of diverse kinds, including men and women.

Arlo watched, shocked. Life was infestation, corruption of the perfect body of the world! Even humankind, even Arlo himself—maggots!

Now he saw the formation of inanimate sentience. While the maggots riddled the fallen giant’s body, the molten metal beneath formed into the solid globe of the planet. Natural forces acted within it: bubbles of gas pushing up, water percolating down, molten rock spreading sideways. Caverns formed as the more volatile substances melted and vaporized, leaving their strata empty. Uneven heat-expansion and coldcontraction forced the layers to buckle and crumble. Amidst this rubble crystals formed, growing enormously in favorable situations and shattering when conditions changed. Some succumbed to slow pressure, transforming into other substances. Some generated substantial electric and magnetic potential; lightning flared, arcing across differentials of charge, remelting metals in spot locations, causing them to flow in myriad rivulets, only to harden abruptly in place. As the shifting pressures and heating continued, new currents were generated, traveling along the metal circuits. Some formed transformers, funneling broad, slow charges into high, narrow ones, producing new currents in the old channels, currents that possessed new properties. Recirculations, juxtapositions, and feedbacks occurred, intensifying the effect, until a portion of it became self-sustaining, like a fire. Then it spread slowly, replicating itself with variations throughout the planet. In some regions natural fires raged, feeding on combustible gases; these provided a steady source of heat energy which translated into constantly moving air. In others, the formations were so constituted as to refrigerate themselves, for the air expanded and cooled quite rapidly. These temperature differentials enabled diverse processes to operate. After billions of years of random, inanimate experimentation, one of the complex feedback circuits achieved the ultimate condition: sentience.

This occurred wherever conditions suited—and there were many such planets in the universe. But these inanimate sentiences were largely immobile; they could think, but not act. And so, constant, they functioned—until the maggots of life intruded destructively. The chemical processes of life had already transformed the atmospheres of all planets they infested, developing corrosive properties that prevented any surface expansion of mineral organization; now they burrowed down into the deep rock itself. The war between the living sentiences and the dead sentiences began.

The forces of the living were multiple. On thousands of planets in the adjoining reaches of the galaxy, the maggots squirmed. But on only a few did they achieve the power to infect neighboring systems. They accomplished this by using machines: truncated, limited versions of mineral intellect, adapted to provide not superior thought but superior physical force. The mineral sentiences, in contrast, adapted truncated versions of living entities, also used for mechanical force rather than mental. Neither side possessed the sophistication to develop its use of enemy fragments thoroughly, but each side soon became largely dependent on those fragments. It was an ironic impasse.

The main sources of Life’s contagion were four: Lfa, EeoO, Xest, and Human. Each originated on a single planet, festering there for a prolonged period before bursting out.

Arlo watched the spread of life to planets across the galaxy. First the Lfa, who resembled animate piles of refuse, dismantled themselves and formed, after millennia of unsuccess, a viable space-traveling format. Wherever they landed, they formed new Lfa entities by contributing from each entity a part, until the new individual was complete. Then the parent-entities would regenerate the missing parts. It required the presence of fifty to a hundred parents to form one offspring in this manner, but the new entity was able to function effectively almost from formation. There was no limit to the number of times this assembly tax could be invoked, and it was possible for each parent entity to contribute to several offspring simultaneously. Thus the Lfa expansion through the galaxy was limited largely by the velocity of their space-travel assemblages and the availability of suitable worlds. In a few thousand years they had colonized half the galaxy.

The EeoO, in contrast, replicated largely by pooling. A minimum of four entities—one each of E, e, o, and O—melted and merged in a common puddle, and from this four small EeoO’s coalesced, or more if the pool were larger. As the infants grew, they sundered, first into twin Eo and eO entities, then into mature adult individual E’s, o’s, e’s and O’s. They were now ready to pool, at will or need, preferably with individuals from other parent-pools, for the sake of species-unifying exogamy. However, they were vulnerable when pooled, for any dilution or draining of the pool would interrupt the process, prevent replication, and terminate the contributory entities. Thus the EeoO accounted for only one-fifth the galactic colonization, though the initiation of their expansion may actually have predated that of the Lfa.

The Xests reproduced by fission—any fragment of their bodies, when separated from the whole, formed into a new entity, complete and functional from the outset, possessing the entire mentality of the parent entity. Therefore their potential for replication was greatest in the galaxy. But they believed in economy and fiercely defended their resources by controlling their population and eschewing all but essential contact with other galactic species. So they came to occupy only another fifth of the galaxy.

The Humans were the last to exploit space, but their expansion was explosive even in the volatile framework of Life. Their form of replication was not remarkably efficient, but they had accumulated a tremendous population on their home-world before achieving space. They were sexed entities, with the coupling of one male and one female required for genesis of a new individual. The male inserted seeds into the body of the female, who subsequently fissioned into two: an adult and an infant. The adult protected and fed the infant until it became adult, a time-consuming process involving as much as a third of the normal Human individualentity life span. However, it was possible for one or two adults to conceive and care for several infants in overlapping sequence, and infant losses were minimal. The result was inevitable growth of population, with strong cultural continuity. The Humans colonized a full tenth of the galaxy in less than four hundred of their years.

The initial encounter between life and nonlife sentience occurred in that small Human sector of the galaxy, perhaps because this species was most prone to raid the mineral interiors of its planets. Therefore Humans predominated at first—but soon the other three living galactic sentiences joined in the battle, recognizing a common threat.