Chthon

1

It was hot in that cabinet. Aton licked at the salt and grime on his lips as rivulets itched down his neck and soaked into the rough prison shirt. In the sweating surface of the book he carried he saw a dark-haired, clean-shaven man.

Normal features, average stature—was this the person of a criminal? Am I, he thought, am I…?

It did not matter. Chthon was the prison of the damned, and the man incarcerated here was damned, whether there was justice in it or no. Legally damned and legally dead: no one escaped from Chthon.

The prison was deep, natural cavity far beneath the surface of a secret planet and hidden forever from the stars. No cells were there, no guards; only the living refuse of man’s empire, dying in unthought wealth. For Chthon was a garnet mine, the moderate value of its individual stones complemented by their enormous number. The manner of its enterprise was this: every twenty-four hours the single elevator went down, loaded with food. It came up again with several hundred garnets. If the value of the stones was not enough, the next shipment of food was reduced.

Aton understood this much of Chthon, and it was as much as any free man could know. Now he was to learn the other side of it, the underside. The close cage shuddered, grinding on down into the fevered bowels, and Aton rocked with its motion. He felt the heat increase; smelled his own reek.

Am I dreaming of the impossible? he thought. Is it foolish to believe in a physical escape, simply because of a rumor I overheard in space? Return from death. Freedom. Perhaps even… completion?

The motion stopped. The door opened to roaring darkness.

Heat blasted in, oppressive, suffocating. Sweat drenched his light uniform.

Knowing that he had no choice, Aton stepped into the gloom.

“One side!” a voice bellowed in his ear. Rough hands shoved him away. He stumbled into the center of the room, his book clamped under one arm, barely making out the shapes of men as they moved between him and the lighted interior of the lift.

They worked silently, three of them, hauling out crates and stacking them against the nearest wall. When the elevator was empty they carried smaller metal caskets carefully inside.

One of them slammed the door, cutting off the light. The garnets, Aton realized. The men were husky, bearded, longhaired, and naked, and each had a sloshing bag of some sort strapped to his back. The effect, in the poor light, was grotesque; they reminded Aton of hunch-backed trolls.

The noise in the room was so great that Aton could not hear the elevator ascending, but he knew that his only link to the outside world was gone. He was now at the mercy of Chthon.

There was light after all—a sputtering glow, green and strange, given off by the walls and ceiling, as though they were smoldering. His eyes adjusted. He would be able to navigate.

Now the men came at him. “New man, eh. Name.”

“Aton Five.”

“Five?”

“Take it or leave it.”

They considered that, weighing him as wolves of the pack weigh the stranger. “O.K., Five—this’s your orientation. Down here we don’t ask questions. We don’t answer questions. We don’t care why they shipped you here, only don’t do it again. Just don’t make trouble, hold your end, and you’ll get along. Get it?”

They waited for his reaction, hard, lupine.

“Where do I—”

One man stepped forward, swinging an open palm. Aton automatically caught the blow on a raised forearm. He was a hair late, and the hand hit the side of his face hard enough to make his head ring. He backed a step. “What the—?”

“Mind your business. We don’t warn twice.”

Aton fell back, angry. For a moment he toyed with the idea of repaying the advice in kind. That would mean fighting all three, probably at once. Was that what they wanted? But behind his mounting temper he realized that the suggestion was good. Don’t make trouble—at least until you know your way around. There was no point in beginning his sojourn here as a combatant. Time enough for that later. He nodded.

“Good,” the man said. He laughed. “Remember—we all got to die together!”

The others guffawed and went to pick up the crates. Aton would remember them.

“Advice,” one said as he passed, not unkindly. “Strip. Like us. Hot.”

They tramped off, leaving him alone. Were they typical? He knew there were women in Chthon, but in a prison without guards or any other exposure to the world, conventions must long since have bowed to the stifling heat. Abnormal mores were bound to prevail—unless he was being set up for some further joke.

Aton looked about him. The room was rounded, the walls irregular but not rough. Stone, coated with glow. Long ago some scouting party must have explored these caverns, or at least enough of them to locate the garnets and determine that there was no feasible exit. He wondered whether the air was natural or somehow piped in; its presence seemed too provident to be coincidence.

But surely this terrible heat could not be borne for any length of time. This was a stifling oven. There had to be cooler sections, or it would be impossible to live. He discarded his sopping uniform, took up his book, and made his way out of the room. At the exit he touched the wall cautiously: it was hot, but not burning, and the greenish slime continued to glow for a few seconds on his fingers. The heat was evidently not from cavern chemicals.

He found himself in a short tunnel. He had been told that Chthon consisted of a maze of lava tubes, and intellectually he knew that their formation had been completed many centuries before, but it was hard to be objective. The far end of the passage pulsed with heat, and the roaring sound grew constantly louder, as though the primeval forces were still in motion. But there was no other way to go.

At length he emerged into a larger cross tunnel, a dozen feet in diameter—and was smashed into its smooth wall by a rushing mass of air. Wind—in closed caverns? This was the source of the noise; but where could such a draft be coming from? Somehow his vision of the infernal region had not included this.

Aton braced himself and forged back into the wind, letting it guide his body down the tunnel. The walls were featureless, except for the glow, and the passage was almost exactly circular in cross section. Could it have been excavated and smoothed by an untold era of wind erosion? Chthon was growing stranger yet.

The fierce breeze—thirty miles an hour or more—served nicely to cool his laboring body, giving him at least part of the answer to survival here. But almost immediately he felt its consequence: dehydration. He would have to have water, and quickly, before his body shriveled. Somewhere there should be other people, and suitable provisioning.

Moving along with one hand against the wall, Aton suddenly fell into an inlet. The wind subsided here, and the heat returned; but grateful for the rest, he decided to follow it on down. The passage was small, hardly high enough to clear his head, and opened into another cell or room similar to the one in which he had been deposited originally. A dead end.

He was about to retrace his steps when he realized with a start that this room was occupied. There was a mutter and a stirring, and a shape rose from the curving floor. It came toward him, oddly suggestive and a little frightening, bringing to mind an image from his past; nebulous, a beauty and a horror at once too tempting and too painful to handle fairly. The background howling of air seemed to shape itself into sinister music. Is it the song, he thought, the terrible broken song, the melody of death? Is this my demon, my succubus, come grinning to snatch away my manhood?

A woman’s voice issued from the figure, unctuous yet appealing. “You want to make love to me?” she asked.

Now he could see the outline of a nude female body. Conscious of his own exposure, he held his book protectively in front as she approached. He was uncertain of her intention, and she brushed the book aside and slipped into the circle of his arm. She was confident; apparently she was able to see things more readily than he, in this half-light.

“Love,” she said. “Make love to Laza.” Her naked breasts pressed up against his chest.

He was afraid of her and of his phantasm. Warned by the tenseness of her body, he jerked backward. Her hand came down savagely, the sharp stone in her fist just grazing his cheek. Twice in an hour he had been attacked. “Then die, you bastard!” she cried. “Die, die…”

Her breath caught, choking, and she fled to the far side of her cell, to fling herself down in a shuddering heap. He could still hear her tortured whisper, “Die, die…” Had she really intended to kill him?

He stepped back into the connecting hallway. Laza heard the sound and came upright immediately. “You want to make love to me?” she inquired, exactly as before.

Aton ran.

The main tube went on and on, intersecting numerous cloisters. Some seemed to be empty; others broadcast strange noises, grunts, scratchings. Aton passed them quickly.

Thirst drove him on. The cruel wind chafed at his back, wringing moisture from him. He had kept his shoes, but now he removed them and let his sweat-sodden feet breathe. And pushed on.

At last the sound of voices drew him into a larger cavern. The wind eased slightly, filling more spacious quarters, and the noise diminished. Aton’s numbed senses came back to life. There were several people here, working and chatting idly. In the center of the hall was a large metal device on wheels with a spoked axle rising from the top. Two men were pushing at the spokes and slowly rotating the top as though it were the wheel of a grinder. Nearby two other people squatted against the wall, carving small objects with slender blades. Beyond them a single man flipped pebbles into baskets. All were naked.

Nearest to him was a ponderously genial woman who spotted the visitor immediately. “New man, eh?” she said, using the same greeting he had met before. More trouble?

“Aton Five.”

“You came to the right place,” she said. “Everybody comes to Ma Skinny.”

She laughed at Aton’s blank look. “Naw—it’s ’cause I handle the skins. You’ll be wanting one, ’fore you shrivel. Here.” She went to the central machine. The men stopped their grinding to allow her to remove a bag hanging on a spout in the side.

She brought it to him. “This here’s your skin. You don’t never want to leave it behind.”

Aton took it, uncomprehending. It was made of some sturdy fabric, weighed about twenty pounds, and had straps obviously designed as a body harness. Now he saw that every person in sight wore a similar bag—the only article of clothing. But what was the purpose?

Ma Skinny picked up an empty bag and suspended it from the spout, allowing the men to resume their labor. Slowly it began to fill.

At last Aton caught on. “Water!” he exclaimed, taking the narrow neck of his skin into his mouth and sucking thirstily. The liquid was cool, comparatively, and delicious.

The woman looked on approvingly. “Worth mor’n garnets,” she said. “We just grind it out of the ’denser, here, and everybody’s happy. Just so long’s they stay right side of ol’ Skinny.”

Aton got the message. This woman had power, in whatever subterranean hierarchy existed here.

She went on to introduce the others. “Folks, this here’s Five. These two’re my pushers, this shift, Sam and Horny. Down this way we got ol’ man Chessy. He makes whole chess sets out of broken garnet stone, or whatever it is. Nice work.” Aton nodded, surprised again. Outside, those figurines were worth a fortune, both for the material and the craftsmanship—yet here the artisan was revealed as a gray old man squatting nakedly and poking with a battered knife. “This other’s Prenty to him. They got an understanding.”

The apprentice was a young woman, hardly out of her teens, but quite well formed and pretty. Aton wondered what crime she could have committed to be sentenced to Chthon at such an age. He imagined that their “understanding” was more to gratify the old man’s ego than his romantic prowess. Reputation must be most important here—a good point to remember.

Ma Skinny led the way to the man with the baskets. “Tally, here,” she said. “Good man with figures, good eye for garnets. Don’t cross him.” Tally was sorting the little stones by color: a basket each for shades of red and brown, dimly distinguishable in the imperfect light. An attractive girl resorted them into graduated sizes. “That’s Silly,” Ma said. “Her name, I mean—Selene, Silly. You’ll learn.” The girl looked up and giggled.

“Everybody’s got a job,” Ma finished. “You run around a little, Five, get settled, and we’ll fix you up with something. No hurry.” Too casually, then: “You smuggled in some tools.”

“Tools?”

Her alert eye was on his bound book. She wouldn’t ask the question. Aton opened it. “LOE,” he said. “A text. They let me bring one thing.” She turned away, wordless, disgusted.

That was the tone of it. Once acclimatized to the heat and wind and able to find his way around the interlocking tunnels by sound and sight, Aton found prison life to be surprisingly easy. Too easy there could be no enduring drive towards escape, in such a situation. The inhabitants were contented, as he was not. He would have to find a catalyst.

The caverns extended down interminably. The garnets were brought up from somewhere below for sorting and trade with the outside world. They commanded a price far beyond their actual worth as gems. Artificial stones could easily surpass them in quality, but lacked the appeal of notoriety. These were the produce of condemned hands, originating in nefarious Chthon. Man always placed a premium on the morbid.

Aton found the attitude of the prisoners inexplicable. This was supposed to be the worst prison in the human sector of the galaxy, reserved for the criminally insane, the incorrigible, the perverted—those whom society could neither cure nor ignore. Chthon was pictured outside as the home of perpetual rampage and orgy, sadism and torture beyond belief.

Instead Aton discovered a crude but placid society whose members followed their own advice: make no trouble. The genuinely insane were isolated in their cells and cared for by volunteer wardens. Unless these ventured out, they were left to their own devices.

Even normal people could hardly be expected to get along so well. Were these really criminals? If not, why did they accept their lot so easily? There had to be a missing element, some binding force. He could not act until he understood its nature.

2

“Aton.” The voice was a low, warm alto.

He came out of his reverie to discover the girl Selene, provocatively posed, not giggling. Her eyes had lingered on him whenever they met; but though aware of this, Aton had felt he should be wary of women until the other mysteries were solved. A woman was trouble anywhere.

She came toward him, breasts outthrust. “I ain’t no Laza, Aton,” she said, intercepting his thought. “It ain’t going to kill you to come near me.”

Aton was unmoved. “Tally’s woman, aren’t you?”

“Tally knows where I am. Tally knows where everybody is, all the time.” She came to stand against him, soft and lithe and feline. “How long since you had a woman, Aton?”

She had scored. It had been too long a time. He had learned the way of things in space, and space was over, now, perhaps forever. Judging from the attitude he had seen so far, she was probably telling the truth about Tally. He might even have sent her, as a gesture of amity.

Selene moved away, hiding behind her water-skin. Certain that she had his attention now, she began to dance, with a rhythmic hop and swing fully as alluring as intended. Aton set his book against the wall and went after her.

She giggled and skipped away. Playing an intricate hide-and-seek with hands and body, she led him into a side passage. Aton checked, suddenly wary, but it was empty.

She brushed against him. He caught her and pinned her against her water-skin along the wall. Their lips met abruptly in a kiss, broke, touched passionately; then she escaped and pirouetted into the center of the cell. Her eyes glowed.

Aton stalked her, cutting off the exit and herding her into a niche; she dodged and wriggled with delight.

Selene began to hum a tune when she saw that she was fairly trapped. It was the final artifice: an innocent, indifferent melody, as though she were not aware of company. It should have launched him into the terminal effort.

Instead it drove him back, cooling his ardor instantly. It was the broken song.

She saw that something was wrong. “What’s the matter, Aton?”

He turned his back. “Get out of here, Silly. You aren’t half the woman I crave.”

Shocked, then in flashing anger, she ran. Aton listened to the sound of her footsteps, a bare patter in the screaming wind. They merged to form the music of the broken song.

“Malice,” he thought. “Oh, Malice—will you never leave me?”

It was a dream, of course, but only Aton knew it, and he, lured by the might-have-been it dangled before him, was foolish enough to forget that it was. In his conception he was not standing alone in the tunnel; the woman was not fleeing in anger. There had been a failure, yes, but not a total one.

She took his arm as they walked down the dim tunnel. She wore a light blouse and dark skirt which did more to enhance her figure than any nudity could do.

“Jill,” he said, “I wanted to apologize for what happened. But you have to understand the impact the song has upon me. When that comes—”

She jogged his arm. He could feel the gentle pressure of her fingers through the coat. “My name is Selene,” she said.

They turned into a side passage. It slanted down, expanding. “Your interest caught me by surprise,” he continued, aware of the awkwardness of his explanation. “Somehow I never thought of you as a woman, Jill.”

“Why do you keep calling me ‘Jill’?” she demanded. “Look at me, Aton. I’m Selene. Silly Selene, cave girl.”

He looked. “I suppose you are,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you, clothed.”

“Thanks.”

He guided her to a seat and found a place beside her. “I never realized there was one of these in Chthon. We had a theater for the crew on board the Jocasta, but I never attended…”

He faded out, alarmed. Her hand was in his lap, fumbling with the fastening of his trousers. Then her fingers were inside, reaching down to discover what lay there. He tried to protest, but immediately the people in the neighboring seats turned to stare, forcing him to silence lest his exposure be advertised.

The feature flashed on the big front screen. Aton’s attention leaped to embrace that still scene. A man, toiling up a steep path, a strong man in antique costume, a young man garbed in flowing robes of indeterminate color. One man, but filled with meaning. Behind him the trail tapered away to a rocky, mossy slope, strangely attractive as a landscape.

The picture shifted, fading into another tableau. This time the foreground opened: a sheer drop with a horrifying hint of depth. The path had crested, as though running through a pass; indeed, one rounded hillock swelled in sight, while the surrounding land dipped away. Two men faced each other, having mounted on either side, meeting at the top. On the right was the strong young man of the previous picture; on the left, an older man, similarly dressed. They confronted, talking or debating. The old man’s arm was raised in imperious gesture.

The third frame was more forceful: the young man’s body was twisted, caught in violent motion, arms outflung, face contorted. The other person was poised in space beyond the precipice, arms raised as if to flail the air, birdlike, but falling nevertheless. They had had an argument, a falling-out, perhaps a contest of strength over the right-of-way. Who could say, since the images were fragmentary and silent? But the deed was done, irrevocably. Far below, out of sight, Aton knew that there was a narrow river bed—and wondered why he knew.

One more picture, seemingly unrelated to the prior sequence: a huge animal shape with mighty folded wings and the sensual breasts of a mature woman. Its mouth was open in a kind of question, as if to pose a riddle. That was all.

Unutterable horror seized Aton, a sick revulsion that churned his stomach and drove his senses back away from his naked face, recoiling from the monstrous import.

Now there was sensation in another area. He looked down and saw the female hand, clamped like calipers, stretching cruelly. But it was a cord, a serpentine length of it, blood-red in the half-light, connecting his belly to hers. He saw her face, and it was not the face of Laza, who would kill him, but another face, more lovely and more evil than any he could imagine.

He tried to wrench free, but could not move. The pain of his emotion was terrible as the stretching continued, a narrowing tautness wrenching the root loose from the flesh. Suddenly the melody steamed up from the horror and he knew fulfillment at last.

He woke, sweating, shaking, to the approach of footsteps, knowing that he had to get out of Chthon.

3

“Five.” This time it was a man’s voice. Selene had not taken long to spread the word. He turned to find Tally and two of his helpers. “I didn’t touch her,” Aton said.

Tally was grim. “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

Aton kept a wary eye on the two other men. He knew their business, and he recognized one of them. “Because Silly made a pass at me?”

“Partly,” Tally said with candor. “She shouldn’t have had to do that. But then you turned her down.”

“I wasn’t making any trouble.”

“No trouble!” Tally exploded. “You damned outsider! You made me the laughing stock of Chthon by proving my girl wasn’t worth taking down. Teasing her so you could really make the point. You could have told her No at the beginning, if you didn’t want it; but no, you had to—”

“It wasn’t that. I wanted her, but—”

Tally’s eyes were calculating. “ ‘But—’? What were you afraid of? Nobody outside will ever see you again. You live our way now. There are no ceremonies, no two-faced rules. She wanted you, and I told her to have her fling. You can’t spawn any bastards down here, not in this climate, if that’s what got you. It just doesn’t take.”

“I knew that. I—”

“You cost me face, Five. There’s only one way I can get it back.”

“There’s something else—” Aton began, but Tally had already signaled, and the two men were closing in. They were brawny; one was the member of the original greeting party who had struck him. They had taken off their skins.

Aton saw that there was no reasonable escape. He licked his lips, not bothering to remove his own water-skin. Had he really wanted to explain?

Timing. Coordination. Decision. Aton sprang. The first man had a naked foot buried in his solar plexus before he realized it. He was hurled back, collapsing bonelessly. Before he struck the ground, Aton was on his companion, wrapping a trained hand in the man’s shaggy beard, jerking the original lunge into a headlong stumble. The calloused knuckles of Aton’s free hand made a dull crunching sound on the other’s temple.

One semiconscious, retching helplessly. One dying with a fractured skull. It had taken perhaps four seconds.

Tally stared down, amazed. “Spaceman,” he said.

“You wanted it the hard way.” Aton knew he had won the man’s respect. “I tried to explain,”

Tally got the men out and came back alone. “All right. I can’t square things with you that way. Only one man I ever saw that could fight like that, and he’s not… available.”

“Spaceman?” Aton asked with interest.

“Krell farmer.”

Aton wondered. The members of the guild that farmed the deadly krell weed had developed the ancient art of karate—kara-ate, the unarmed striking—in a different direction than had their spacefaring cousins. Both struck to disable, maim, or kill; but there was murderous power behind the spaceman’s blow, lethal science behind the farmer’s. Which school was superior? The question had never, to his knowledge, been settled. “Where is he?”

“Name’s Bossman—down below. It isn’t worth it.”

“Nothing’s worth it.”

Tally changed the subject. “I’ll take my loss and forget it. But I want to know one thing, and it isn’t much of my business. I’ll make a trade with you.”

Aton understood the significance of the offer, in this place where information was more valuable than property. “I want to know something, too,” he said. “Honest answers?” He saw immediately that the question was a mistake. The person who cheated on information would not live long.

“Let’s match the questions,” Tally said. The bargaining was on.

“The real Chthon setup.”

“The reason you passed her up.” Belatedly, Aton understood why Tally had cut off his explanation before. He could not accept free knowledge. Easier to settle the grudge first, untangle the threads later. Here was an honest man, Chthon-fashion.

“You may not like the answer,” Aton said.

“I want it straight, all of it.”

They looked at each other and nodded. “Seemed too quiet for you here?” Tally asked rhetorically. “No wonder. This is only part of Chthon—the best part. We keep only the model prisoners: the harmless neurotics, the politicos, the predictable nuts. We have a pretty easy life because we’re selected, we know each Other, and we have the upper hand. But below—well, there is only one way to get down there, and no way back. Anybody we can’t handle gets dropped down that hole and forgotten. That’s where the mine is; we ship food down, they ship the garnets up.”

“A prison within a prison!”

“That’s right. Outside, they think we’re all one big unhappy family, fighting and mining. Maybe that’s the way it is, below. We don’t know. But we like it quiet, here, and we have the same hold on the pit as the outsiders have on us: no garnets, no supplies. We get first pick of the food, and we don’t have to work much, except to keep things running smoothly. We can’t get out but we have a living, and not a bad one at all. Every so often a new man comes down, like you, and makes things interesting for a while, until we get him placed.”

“No way out,” Aton said.

“Our caverns are sealed off from below. That keeps us in, and the monsters out. Below—no one knows where those passages end, or what’s in them.”

Unexplored caverns! There was the only hope for escape. It would mean facing a prison even the hardened inmates feared, mixing with men too vicious to accept any moral restraints. But it was a situation he could exploit.

“About Silly,” Aton said, taking his turn, knowing his course. “It wasn’t her; it wasn’t you. She’s a good girl; I would have taken her if I could. But something stopped me, something I can’t fight.”

“Stopped a spaceman at the point? You’re a strange one. You and your damned book.”

Aton said the word that condemned him: “Minionette.”

Tally stared. “I’ve heard of that. Stories—you mean you met one? They really exist?”

Aton didn’t answer.

Tally backed off. “I’ve heard about what they do. About the kind of man who—” His voice, friendly before, turned cold. “You are trouble. And I sent Silly to you.”

Tally came to his decision. “I don’t want to know any more. You aren’t one of us, Five. You’ll have to go below. I don’t care how many men you kill; you aren’t staying with us.”

It was the reaction Aton had come to expect. “No killing,” he said. “I’ll go now.”

One

Hvee was a pastoral world without pastoral creatures whose rolling mountains and gentle dales bespoke no strife. No dwelling lay within sight of another, and few of the angularities of man’s civilization defaced the natural landscape. The population was small and select, hardly sufficient to man the smallest of cities on megapolistic Earth. There was just one major occupation and one export: hvee.

A small boy wandered through the circular fields of the Family of Five, careful not to tread on the green flowers yearning toward him. Too young to cultivate the crop, he could afford to be its friend. The hvee plants all about him projected, in effect, a multiple personality, an almost tangible aura that was comforting indeed.

He was seven years old, his birthday just one day behind, and he was still awed at the marvel of it, of that extra year so suddenly thrust upon him. The planet was smaller now, by a seventh of his life, and he wanted to explore it all over again and come to understand its new dimension.

In his arms he carried a large, heavy object, his birthday gift. It was a book, sealed in shiny weatherproof binding and closed by a bright metal clasp with a miniature combination lock. Ornate letters on its surface spelled out L O E, and beneath them, in script, his name: ATON FIVE.

The virgin forest of Hvee stood at the edge of the gardens, the trees less responsive to human mentality than the cultivated plants, but friendly all the same. The boy walked in the shadow of the wood, looking back toward the house of his father, Aurelius, far across the field. He stood beside the new garden shed, built within the year, looking winsomely up at its lofty peaked roof and thinking thoughts too large for him. Then he looked down behind it, where the hot black highway wriggled toward the distant spaceport—a pavement leading beyond even his present horizons.

At this moment of introspection the sound of music came, borne on the gentle wind, almost too fleeting to be real. The boy stopped to listen, turning his head this way and that, searching out the strains. His musical sense was untrained, but the compelling beauty of this melody could not be denied.

The song rose and fell in spectral ululations, the tenuous melody from some faerie instrument. There were bird-songs in it, and the rippling of hidden forest water, and the delicate sounds of the uncomplicated melodies of ancient troubadours. Aton was reminded of music he would later come to recognize as “Greensleeves” and “The Fountains of Rome” and older and younger pieces, and he was enthralled.

Unfinished, it stopped. The boy of seven forgot his other explorations, overcome by a desire to listen to the finish. He had to hear its end.

The melody began again, thrillingly, and he clutched the giant book to his chest and trailed his curiosity into the forest. The fascination grew, taking firmer hold on his mind; this was the loveliest thing he had ever heard. The great trees themselves seemed responsive to it, standing silently and letting it drift among them. Aton touched the bark of their trunks as he passed, drawing courage as he skirted the bottomless forest well (afraid of its black depth) and went on.

He could make out the music more readily now, but it had led him to an unfamiliar part of the forest. It was a voice—a woman’s voice, full and sweet with overtones of promise and delight. The delicate arpeggios of a soft-toned stringed instrument accompanied it, counterpointing the vocal. She was singing a song, the meaning of half-heard words fitting the mood of the forest and the day.

The boy came to a glade and peeked through the tall ferns rising strongly at its edge. He saw the nymph of the wood. She was a young woman of striking beauty, so elegant that even a child just mastering seven could understand immediately, without question, that there could be no other on his planet to match her. He watched and listened, spellbound.

She sensed him, hiding there, and ceased her singing. “No!” he wanted to cry as the song was broken again in midrefrain; but she had put aside her instrument.

“Come to me, young man,” she said, clearly and not loudly at all. Discovered when he had thought himself secure, he went to her, abruptly bashful.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Aton Five,” he said, proud of a proud name. “I’m seven years old yesterday.”

“Seven,” she said, making him feel that it was indeed the right age to be. “And what is this burden you have undertaken?” she inquired, touching the volume in his arms and smiling.

“This is my book,” he said with diffident vanity. “It has my name.”

“May I see it?”

Aton stumbled back a step. “It’s mine!”

She looked at him, making him feel ashamed of his selfishness. “It’s locked,” he explained.

“But are you able to read it, Aton?”

He tried to tell her that he knew that the big LOE spelled The Literature of Old Earth, and that the rest was his own name, to show that it belonged to him; but the words got all tangled up in his throat as he encountered her deep and silent eyes. “It’s locked.”

“You must never tell the numbers to anyone, ever,” she said. “But I will close my eyes and let you open it yourself.”

She closed her eyes, her features as calm and perfect as those of a statue, and Aton felt somehow committed and not a little confused. He fumbled with the lock, turning the dial in the pattern so recently memorized! The clasp popped open and the tinted pages were exposed.

Her lashes lifted at the sound and her gaze fell upon him once more, as warm and bright as a sunbeam. He pushed the volume into her waiting hands and watched, half fearfully, as she turned the fine sheets.

“It is a beautiful book, Aton,” she said, and he flushed with pride. “You will have to learn to read the old language, English, and this is a difficult thing, because the symbols do not always match the words. They are not so clear as those of Galactic. Do you think you can do that?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled. “Yes, you can, if you try.” She found a place and spread the pages flat. “You are a child, Aton, and this book will have meaning for you. Here is what Mr. Wordsworth says about the immortality of childhood: ‘O joy! that in our embers / Is something that doth live, / That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!’ ”

Aton listened blankly. “It only seems obscure,” she said, “because your symbols do not quite match those of the poet. But when you begin to grasp it, the language of poetry is the most direct route to the truth you can find. You will understand, Aton, perhaps when you are twice seven.

“And when you are twice seven what will you be, what will you be doing?”

“I’ll be farming hvee,” he said.

“Tell me about the hvee.”

And so Aton told her about the green flowers that grew in the fields, waiting to love, and how when a person took one it loved him and stayed green as long as he lived, and survived on no more than the air and his presence, and how when the owner grew old enough to many he gave his hvee to his betrothed and it lived if she loved him and died if her love was false, and if it did not die he married her and took it back to himself and did not test her love ever again, and how the hvee grew only on Hvee, the world named after it or maybe the other way around, in the ground, and was sent all over the human sector of the galaxy because people everywhere wanted to know they were loved, no matter what.

“Oh, yes,” she said, when he ran out of breath. “Love is the most painful thing of all. But tell me, young man—do you really know what it is?”

“No,” he admitted, for his words had been rhetoric, a rehearsal of adult folklore. He wondered if he had heard her description correctly.

Then she said something else to him, something strange. “Look at me. Look, Aton, and tell me that I am beautiful.”

He looked obediently at her face, but all he could see were her black-green eyes and her hair, a fire and a smoke, burning and swirling in the wind. “Yes,” he said, finding unexpected pleasure in the saying, “you are beautiful, like the blaze upon the water when my father burns the swamp in the spring.”

She laughed with the light echo of her music, accepting the compliment on its own terms. “I am indeed,” she agreed. She reached out her hand and lifted his chin with her cool fingers so that he gazed into her eyes once more. The effect was hypnotic. “You will never see a woman as beautiful as I,” she said, and he found himself compelled to believe it absolutely, never to question it so long as he should live.

She let him go. “Tell me,” she said, “tell me—have you ever been kissed?”

“My aunt kisses me every time she visits,” Aton said, wrinkling his nose.

“Do I resemble your aunt?”

He examined her. Women hardly counted in the primogenitive genealogy of Hvee, and the aspect of his father’s sisters was lackluster. “No.”

“Then I shall kiss you now.”

She touched her fingers to his chin again and put her other hand on top of his head to tilt it sidewise a little. She held him, just so, and leaned forward to kiss him softly on the mouth.

Aton, seven, did not know what to do. He felt nothing, he was ever after to tell himself, dwelling on this moment; but that nothing he did feel he could not understand.

“Have you been kissed that way before?”

“No.”

She smiled brilliantly. “No one, no one else will kiss you that way—ever.”

Her eye fell on a tiny plant almost at her foot. “This too is beautiful,” she said, letting her hand drop toward it.

Aton spoke sharply. “That’s a hvee. A wild hvee.”

“May I not have it?” she asked, amused.

“May you not!” he said, unconsciously imitating her choice of words. “Hvee is only for men. I told you.”

She laughed once more. “Until they are loved.” She took it up. “See. See, it does not wither in my hand. But I will give it to you, my present, and it will love you and stay with you as long as you remember my song.”

“But I don’t know your song.”

She put the green stem in his hair. “You must come back to me to learn it.” Her fine hands took his shoulders, turning him around. “Go, go now, and do not turn back.”

Aton marched off, confused but somehow elated.

He returned next day, but the glade was empty. The nymph of the wood had gone, and had taken her song with her. He dwelt on it, trying to recover the tune, but he possessed only a fleeting fragment. He touched the flat stump where she had sat, wondering whether the warmth of her body remained in it, beginning to doubt that she had been there at all. But he was unwilling to let the vision of the nymph go. She had talked to him and kissed him and left him the hvee and part of a song, and the memory was strange and strong and wonderful.

In the days and weeks that followed he continued to visit that place in the forest, hoping for some hint of the music. Finally he stopped and gave himself up to the more somber world of reality—almost.

Their nearest neighbor lived five miles down the valley. This was a branch of the low-caste Family of Eighty-One, farming poorer land and doing it less conscientiously. Aurelius never mentioned them. Aton had not known of their existence until his nymph indirectly introduced him to the children of Eighty-One.

Taken by a fit of loneliness when his tenth visit to the forest had been to no avail, Aton had either to assume the woman to be gone forever (because he found that easier than counting on into two figures with only ten fingers), or to begin a search for her farther afield. He chose the latter. Surely she was somewhere, and the logical place to investigate was the long valley, since he was not supposed to walk along the hot black highway. His aunt always arrived by aircar from that direction, over the valley, and while he did not conceive her residence in terms of place, nor wish to visit it, the fact added logic to his decision.

He set off, armed with his weighty LOE, and marched through many wonderous domains of field and meandering stream and dark stretches of forest. The world, it developed, was a bit larger than anticipated; but he shifted the growing mass of the book from arm to arm, and rested occasionally, and disciplined his little feet to be undaunted by the unthinkable distances they traveled, and found himself at last at the fringe of Eighty-One.

In this manner he came to meet, not the nymph for which he searched, but the twin boys his own age, Jay and Jervis, and their little sister Jill, and compounded a friendship that was to endure an even seven years.

“Look—he got a hvee!” Jay shouted, spotting the determined traveler.

The children of Eighty-One clustered around Aton, who responded to this interest in his mark of distinction with a condescending frown. “Why don’t you take one?” he inquired. Jervis skuffled. “I tried. It died.”

“Where you get yours?” Jay demanded.

Aton explained that a lovely woman in the forest had given him the plant for his seventh birthday, and that he was looking for her now.

“I wish I could fib like that,” Jervis said enviously. “Can you make a bomb?”

“We’re making a bomb!” little Jill exclaimed.

Jervis slapped her across her bare chest. “No girls!” he pronounced. “This is man’s business.”

“Yeah,” said Jay.

“Yeah,” Aton echoed, though it made no difference to him. “But I need a safe place for my book. It’s got Words-Earth in it.”

“Is that like purple sand?” Jay asked. “Maybe we can use some for our bomb.”

“No! Words-Earth is a poet. He makes rhymes about hot ashes. ‘Oh, joy that in our embers’.”

“Who cares about that stuff?” Jervis said. “Real men make bombs.”

In due course the three were ensconced in the twins’ hideout, a hollow in the ground not far from the hog corral, concealed by thick bushes. They were fashioning a bomb from rocks and colored sand. Jervis had heard that the correct mixture of sulphur (which they could recognize because it was yellow) and saltpeter would explode, if dropped hard enough. But somehow it wasn’t working.

“Must be the salt,” Jervis said. “This stuff is just white sand. We need real salt.”

Jill, hovering just outside, saw her opportunity. “I can get some salt!”

When she returned with a shaker snitched from the kitchen, she refused to give it up until granted a share of the enterprise. For the rest of the afternoon she attached herself to Aton, somewhat to his disgust. She was muddy all over, and her long black braids kept falling into the bomb.

Two

The years were left behind. Tutoring began. Aton became versed in the history and traditions of his planet and the great Family of Five. He learned to read the difficult mother language and gradually, wonderfully, worked his way through the mighty text of LOE. He learned to count far beyond ten, and to do other things with numbers; he learned the K scale of temperature and the § scale of time. He began the long hvee apprenticeship.

His free time, more valuable now, was spent largely at the farm of Eighty-One. The boys went on to other projects after giving up on the bomb. Jay and Jervis were not obligated to endure the extent of tutoring required of a son of Five, and had an easier time of it. Jill never relinquished her initial affection for Aton. The twins teased him constantly: “Kiss her and maybe she’ll bring some more salt. Good salt.” But he saw her as the sister he had somehow never been granted, and contented himself with yanking her braids just hard enough to make her behave, while time acted subtly on all of them.

At home, the farming of the delicate green flowers was an intricate matter, composed of science, art, and attitude. It was soon evident that Aton had the touch. The plants he worked with grew larger and finer than average, and his pilot plots flourished. His future as a farmer seemed assured.

His future as a mechanic might have been otherwise. He learned to operate the Five aircar, pinpointing planetary coordinates on the machine’s geographic vernier. The location grid was calibrated in standard units for easting and northing, with the superimposed vernier scale throwing everything out of focus except the correct reading. This was where Aton had endless difficulty. He seemed to lack mechanical aptitude, at least as a child. “Don’t ever join the Navy,” the tutor warned. “They’ll be certain to make a machinist out of you. They have uncanny ability to select exactly the wrong man for the job.” But once Aton mastered the technique he came to respect it well. There was something about the sudden sharp focus, after interminable struggle, that was exhilarating.

Perhaps, he thought, the beauty of that focus could be appreciated only because it came after struggle.

One thing continued to dull his appreciation of his destiny: the lingering image of the nymph of the wood. He could not be entirely complacent while that mystery remained. As he worked in the field, sweating in the hot sun to remove the encroaching weed-plants (he thought of them as krell, though they were hardly dangerous) from the valuable hvee, the broken song ran through his mind, insistent, tantalizing. Where had she come from? What had been her purpose? What could she have wanted with a small boy?

Gradually, age dimmed the memory. Only the central core of dissatisfaction remained, keeping him ever so slightly off-balance, making him wonder whether the life he contemplated as a farmer of hvee was actually the very best available. Yet—what else could there be?

He was a young man of fourteen, transplanting infant hvee near the edge of the property, when the distant melody came a second time. His hands shook. Had she—had she returned at last to the glade?

He set his plants aside and followed the magic sound, now eager, now holding back. Excitement pounded in him as he circled the disused deep well within the forest. Was there really a nymph? Did she summon him?

He arrived at the glade, which was almost unchanged from his memory of seven years. She was there! She was there, sitting and singing, her quick fingers rippling over the little instrument—an offworld, six-stringed lute lovely beyond belief. The ancient image in his mind faded before the new reality. The forest, the glade, the very air about her was beautiful.

He stood at the edge, absorbing her presence. It seemed only a moment since he had stood this way before; the intervening time a lonely dream—a moment and an eternity. She had not changed—he was the one who had aged seven years. And what he saw now was not what he had seen as the child of seven.

She wore a light green dress, translucent in the spot of sunlight, laced up the front in a bodice unused on Hvee. Her face was pale and fair, framed by the luster of hair which flowed deep red and deep black in fascinating alliance. There was a gentle fullness in her figure, not voluptuous, not slim. Her aspect represented a juxtaposition of opposites that Aton had never consciously realized he was searching for. Fire and water, so often at war, here merged into exquisite focus like the crossing scales of the vernier.

He stood entranced, forgetting time and self in the delight of that study.

She spied him, as before, and put aside her song. “Aton, Aton, come to me.”

She knew him! He stood before the lovely woman, embarrassed, flushed by the first ungainly surges of manhood. She was man’s desire, and in her presence he felt great and crude, conscious of the earth on his hands and the sweat on his shirt. He could not stay; he could not leave.

“Fourteen,” she said, putting her magic into that word. “Fourteen. Already you are taller than I.” She stood, unfolding as a flower, to show that it was true.

“And you are wearing my hvee,” she said, reaching up to take it from his hair. It nested in her hand, its green blossom hardly darker than her dress. “Will you give it to me now, Aton?”

Speechless, he gawked at her, unable to comprehend the offer. “Ah, it is too soon, too soon,” she said. “I will not take it from you now, Aton. Not yet.” She noted his curling, empty hands. “Where is your book, Aton?”

“I was in the field—”

“Yes, oh, yes,” she said, twirling the hvee. “You are twice seven and you are a farmer now. But do you remember—”

“William Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’?” he blurted, immediately shocked by his own loudness.

She caught his hand in hers, squeezing it. “Never forget, Aton, what a wonderful thing it is to be a child. There is that immortal bit of light in you, a ray of that sun for which you are named. You must cherish that ember, and never let it die, no matter how you grow.”

“Yes,” he said, unable to say more.

She held the hvee to her cheek. “Tell me, tell me again, Aton—am I not beautiful?”

He gazed into the black and green depths of her eyes and was lost. “Yes,” he said. “The forest fire, and the still water. You drown me in fire—”

Her laugh was the echo of candlelight and thicket streams. “Am I then so devastating?”

You compelling creature, he thought. You play with me, and I am helpless.

She reached her arms around him, standing close to replace the hvee in his hair. The light perfume of her body intoxicated his senses. She was timeless; she was perfection. “You have found no woman to compare to me,” she said.

Protest was useless; even her vanity was rapture. No mortal woman could rival the splendor of her person.

“You must not forget me,” she said. “I shall kiss you again.”

Aton stood, hands rigid at his sides, feet rooted, half afraid that if he moved a muscle he would topple. The woman of the forest placed those cool fingers on his elbows, the gentle pressure evoking a responsive tingle from tight shoulders to clenched fists. She raised her sweet lips to his, holding him in ecstasy. The kiss: and desire and chagrin suffused his mind.

Gossamers pinioned his body. Only his voice found volition: “But tomorrow you will be gone,” he heard it say.

She dismissed him. “Go, go now. When you find me again, you will be ready.”

“But I don’t even know your name.”

She waved him away, and his clumsy feet turned him around and marched him from the glade.

What had occupied Aton’s idling imagination up to this point now became more urgent. His attitude changed. Interested in the distaff sex only in a speculative way, until awakened by the forest nymph, he now contemplated a program of self-education that went somewhat beyond that provided by his tutor. He planted hvee in a preoccupied manner—the plants flourishing even so—and pondered ways and means.

He waited impatiently for dusk, then pounded along the old trail leading to the farm of Eighty-One. The wild plants had grown up thickly, obscuring the way and reminding him of the infrequency of his visits to this place, now. How long had it been since he’d laughed and fought with the dissimilar twins, Jay and Jervis? Since he’d let young Jill tag along, recipient of masculine unfairness? The childish games had fallen off and the barriers of status had grown, though he told himself that such things made no difference to him. And wasn’t he coming, at this time of problem and dissatisfaction, to talk it out and make plans with his friends? The twins were more worldly than he. Man-talk would get it out of his system, make the strangeness go, set his confusions to rest. The old companionship would dissipate the nameless unrest he felt.

The house of Eighty-One rose out of the darkness; thin squares of light edged the closed shutters. Aton skirted the steaming hog pen, his passage eliciting the usual incurious porcine grunts. The warm animal smell brought a sympathetic wrinkle of the nostrils, though he had long since ceased to find it objectionable. He came up to the rear of the house and tapped the twins’ window with the measured signal of old.

There was no response. He poked a finger behind the loose shutter and pried it open, peering in as far as his angle of vision permitted. The room was empty.

He banged the wall in futile anger. Where were they? How could they be gone when he wanted to talk? Knowing himself to be unreasonable and a trifle snobbish, he grew angrier yet. He knew that there were other things in the boys’ lives beside himself, particularly since it had been months since his last visit, but the proof of it was irritating. What was he to do?

The shutters parted on a window farther along the dark wall and light flared out to strike the bushes and beam into the night sky. Aton stepped up to it, then hesitated. It could be one of the parents. They, perhaps more conscious of the difference in Family status, and not wanting trouble with the forceful Aurelius, discouraged the association of the children. Aton waited, holding his breath, as a head poked out: ebony outlines, features indistinguishable. Then a long braid flopped over the sill and dangled its ribbon below.

“Jill!”

She spun her head toward him, trying to penetrate the gloom. “That you, Aton?”

He ducked below the spilling light and caught the swinging hair, giving it a sharp rug.

“Ouch!” she yelped, exaggerating her pain. She caught at his hand and disengaged his fingers. “That’s Aton, all right. I’d know that jerk anywhere!”

He got up to face her squarely. “Jerk, am I?”

Her face was very close to his. Her even eyes, pupils black in the shadow, looked back with unexpected depth. “When you jerk my hair—”

He had missed the pun. Embarrassed, and unwilling to admit it, he leaned forward and touched his lips to hers.

The contact was light, but that unpremeditated action surprised him as much as it did her. Jill had always been the tagalong, the drag, the interference in male affairs, the baby sister. Her unconcealed interest in Aton had always bothered him, his irritation accentuated because he was never able to admit his displeasure. He had responded with cruelty, angry at himself for that, but able to think of no alternative.

This was no forest nymph. These lips, while not wholly unresponsive, were untrained. They lacked finesse. There was no magic—except that he was kissing Jill and finding her unrepulsive. He wondered whether he should stop.

She was the one to terminate it, finally, lifting away her head and taking a breath. “Too late for that salt, now,” she said. “You already banged the bomb.”

“I was looking for the twins.” He was unable for the moment to rise to the repartee. Had he, in reality, been looking for this girl? The thought upset him.

She nodded, one braid brushing his face. “I figured it. They’re playing checkers with Dad, up front. Want me to fetch one of them for you?”

“Checkers? Both of them?” Aton asked, trying to keep the conversation going while he settled an obscure but powerful internal conflict.

“Both together. They keep losing, too. Jerv is getting mad.”

Aton had no comment. The silence lengthened between them, awkward, uncomfortable. Neither moved.

Finally he put out a hand, holding it there, letting her interpret his meaning, and not certain that there was any meaning there.

“Well,” she said, and this seemed to make the decision. She took his hand, leaning on it as she brought her foot up to the sill. Her firm legs and thighs showed through the material of skirt and slip in silhouette, stirring a guilty excitement in him.

“Wait a minute,” she said, withdrawing. Had she changed her mind already? He seethed with disappointment and relief. But in a moment the light went out and she was back. “They’ll think I’m in bed.”

Aton helped her down, placing both hands on her waist just above the swelling hips and lifting her away from the high sill. She was heavier than he had thought, and they stumbled together and almost fell as her feet touched the ground. She was nearly as tall as he.

They walked together past the pigpen, this time drawing no remarks, and went on down the remembered trail, selecting this direction by silent consent. Aton’s mind was whirling. It seemed impossible—yet she was a girl, with a body budding into womanhood. She had always liked him, and now she had chosen to express that liking more directly.

They found themselves beside the ancient hideout. The bushes had overrun the entrance, but the main space seemed to be intact. Aton squeezed through first, feeling carefully in the pressing dark, in case there were lizards. He brushed away a few loose burs.

She joined him silently. They would talk now, and she would try to get close, as she always had, and he would push her away automatically, and she would toss her head and giggle…

She found his head, turned it, and placed her mouth against his. His hands came up to push at her chest, touched, and jumped away. Without interrupting the kiss, she caught hold of his shirt and pulled herself closer.

They broke, and she lay back, her form just visible as his eyes acclimatized. “I thought you were just teasing, before,” she said. “But you aren’t, now, are you? I mean.”

“No,” Aton said, uncertain whether he was being mocked.

“All my life, it seems, I’ve been waiting for you to do that. And now it’s done.” Had she meant the kiss?

Aton studied her as well as he was able. She was wearing a summer blouse, gently mounded, and a darker skirt that blended with the ground. She had kicked off her slippers and her white feet stood out, the toes wiggling. “I might do more,” he said, half afraid she would be angry, though he had never paid any attention to her anger before.

“Aton,” she murmured, “You do anything you want. You—” Her voice cut off, as though she were afraid she had said too much.

“Jill, I won’t make fun of you any more—ever,” he told her, trying to stave off an excitement he did not understand nor wholly trust. He was sure, now: this had been her original intent. But did she truly know what it involved?

“You never made fun, Aton. Not really. Not so I minded.”

He placed his hand on her blouse, deliberately now, pressing on the softness beneath. She did not object. He stroked, interested but not satisfied, and afraid, despite his bravado, to do more. Then, carefully, he tugged the material loose from her waistband. “Do you mind if I—?”

“Anything you want, Aton. You don’t have to ask me. Here.” She sat up. He lifted the blouse over her head, seeing her small breasts rise as her arms went up. She wore no bra.

Aton cupped one breast in his hand, feeling its delicate texture, running his thumb over the nipple. Holding her that way, he brought her sitting torso to his and kissed her again. This time there was fire. His tongue reached out to taste the sweetness of hers.

She sank back slowly, and he followed her, kissing her cheek, her throat, her breast. She brushed her fingers through his hair. “Salt—who needs it?” she inquired softly.

He forgot caution and put one hand on her knee, just below the spreading skirt. Her legs parted a little, and he slid his hand up over the kneecap and against the inside of her thigh. The flesh was smooth and very warm.

Throbbing anxiety took him. She had let him go this far; had he reached the limit? If he should expose himself, if he dared, would she take flight and bear a story to her parents that he could hardly deny?

His hand moved on, sliding past boundaries he had hardly dared imagine before. Abruptly it met the junction of her thighs. The soft down told him that she wore no underclothing here, either. Shivering with tension and excitement, he explored farther—and found a thick moisture.

Blood! he thought, shocked. I have trespassed and I have hurt her and now she is bleeding!

He snatched his hand away and lay beside her with the drumbeat of his heart filling the hideout. What have I done! he thought.

Visions of consequence obsessed his mind. The outrage of Eighty-One, the shame of Five. “Why did you do it, you lecherous juvenile!” they would say. “Don’t you know you must never never never touch a girl there?” Would they have to take her to a hospital? How would he ever get her back to her room?

The passion in him died, blasted away by his crime. His eyes stared into the faint cross-lace of branching shrubbery above, limned against the starry sky—a sky not one whit colder than the clutching terror in his heart. What have I—what—she’s only thirteen!

Jill’s hand touched his arm. “Aton?”

He jumped. “Believe me, I never meant to—”

“What’s the matter with you, all of a sudden?” she demanded, rolling over to peer into his face.

Didn’t she know? “The blood. There’s blood.”

She stared. “Blood? What are you talking about?”

“Down—between—I felt it. I never—”

“You’re crazy. It’s not the time of the—” Suddenly she giggled. “Blood? You mean you thought that was—? Haven’t you ever done this before?”

He lifted his head, finding her hot breasts close under his chin. “Before?”

“You don’t know!” she exclaimed, the thoughtless child in her ascendant over the dawning woman. “You really don’t! And here all the time I was looking up to you, waiting for you. I thought you were the big boy.”

Aton cowered behind his raging shame, unable to reply.

Abruptly she was the woman again. “I’m sorry, Aton. I guess you don’t get out much. Here—I’ll show you how—”

But he was on his hands and knees, scrambling away from her, barging out, finding the open night and running, sick with shock and embarrassment.

Three

Aton became a handsome, outwardly confident young man of twenty. He never spoke of his plans; on Hvee it was taken for granted that the son of high Family would advance to his father’s fields. At last he received the summons he had known would come.

The living room of the house of Aurelius was generous and comfortable. A substantial hard-backed wooden chair, almost a throne, sat in a corner, parallel to the entrance; no one could exit without passing under the survey of that grim relic. A plush full-length couch lay against the far wall, seldom used. Above it, placed on the wall so that it faced Aurelius’s chair, was a color photograph of a handsome young woman: Dolores Ten, dead these twenty years and more, in childbirth. Aton had never been able to face that picture without experiencing a deep and painful guilt, compounded by another and rather different emotion that never found conscious expression.

Aurelius Five was old, far nearer to death than his chronological age required. In health he would have been a powerful man, competent, determined, and scheduled to live another fifty years at least; but he was not in health, and only the power of his mind remained. He had exposed his body to the foul spring swamp (’spring’ by convention only, on seasonless Hvee) too many years, and the incurable—locally—blight had taken hold. Aurelius, being what he was, had refused to spend a long convalescence on far-distant Earth, away from his farm. He had left the planet once, only once, and vowed never to do so again, and now he was in the process of dying for that vow. Aton, knowing something of the prior circumstance, agreed with the principle, though he never took it upon himself to tell his father so. They were not that close.

Aurelius might work three more years, and live five. Already he spoke slowly, tired too easily. He was the shell of his youth. The hvee tolerated him, but not gladly; too much of the swamp infested him now, anathema to the tender plants. His frame was gaunt: there seemed to be too little flesh between the hanging skin and brittle bone.

“Aton,” the worn man said. “Soon—”

Aton stood beside his father, expecting to find no pleasure in the interview, but knowing that this had to be. There was too much of sorrow in their relationship, and each saw it in the other, with a premonition that that sorrow had not yet reached its nadir. They shared a cross that could not be put down until more than death had come to pass.

“Soon you must farm the hvee yourself,” Aurelius said, speaking with all the certainty he could muster, pitiful in the implied insecurity of it. “Soon you must take your wife.”

It was out—the condition he had feared. Farming was not a solitary occupation. The death of the daughter of Ten, wife to Aurelius, had damaged the crops of Five, and only Aton’s early success had prevented complete ruin. The emotional climate had to be correct for hvee, and here it was not. The successful farm was run by a family, and the matches were most carefully made. The matter was far too important to be left to the idiosyncrasies of the young.

“Who is she?”

Aurelius smiled, taking the question for assent. “She is the third daughter of eldest Four,” he said.

Four, eldest. This was a good match indeed. Aurelius deserved his tinge of pride. The possessors of First names preferred to have sons to carry on the lineage, but they protected their daughters by wifing them as prominently as possible. Many times the highborn daughters declined to marry at all, rather than drop in station. The ranking of Five was a favorable one, but there were many eager daughters below, and few above. There must have been complex negotiations.

Aton felt a pang, knowing that the effort had gone for nothing. The Families of Hvee were regarded by offworlders as aloof and cold, and in many ways they were; but within the formalistic structure the bonds were deep. Aton seldom spoke to his father, and the relationship between them was something less than usual even for this culture, but it did not surprise him to discover that Aurelius had gone to great pains to arrange an advantageous marriage. The line had to be continued honorably, and Aton was the only man bearing the name of Five who could accomplish this.

“No.”

Aurelius went on. “For you, with a wife, a good wife, the hvee will grow. For you the farm will prosper…” He drifted to a stop. Aton’s answer had penetrated. He closed his tired eyes to shut in the hurt.

“I must take another,” Aton said.

The old man did not try to argue, overtly. “She is strong, she is fair,” he said. “I have seen her. On all of Hvee there is not a finer match. She is not like the—the degradingly promiscuous sluts of the latter Families. You would… love her.”

Aton bowed his head, ashamed for himself and for his father. Aurelius had never stooped to pleading in his life, but he seemed close to it now.

“She is a song, a broken song in the forest,” Aton said, trying to explain what could not be justified. Was he indeed afraid of a liaison with a local girl? He suppressed the thought immediately. “She kissed me and gave me my hvee; I can love no other.”

Aurelius stiffened. Aton had not told him about the forest nymph before. The matching procedures of the Families did not deny the need for love; rather, they insisted upon it. The ritual of the hvee guaranteed it. Aton could not marry without his father’s approval, but he did not have to accept a woman he did not love.

“Show her to me,” Aurelius said at last. He could not yield more. If Aton could bring home his nymph, she would be approved; if he could not, he was honor bound to give the arranged betrothal a chance.

Twenty-one, and the music for which he longed came once again. It was fleeting and haunting, but clear enough to his eager listening. He made for the forest, cruising through the several fields as rapidly as he could without damaging the hvee.

Aurelius signaled from a nearby field. He was not able to work outside every day, but this time he had arranged it. He intended to meet the nymph, and Aton had in effect agreed. Aton waited in an agony of impatience for his father to catch up.

It was the broken song, bending the very trees to its enchantment. It swelled, chord and descant, stirring Aton’s blood with its ultimate promise. This time, this time—

It ceased.

Aton sprinted for the glade, hurdling the well, leaving Aurelius behind. He burst upon it.

He stood absolutely still, listening for the sounds of her departure, but he could hear nothing above the noise of the man behind. She was gone.

Aurelius came up, panting and staggering. But his eyes darted around the glade, fixing on the stump, the ground, the circling trees. He pointed.

The dry leaves had been scraped away from one side of the rotting stump, exposing the spongy loam below. Symbols had been inscribed on the ground, hastily and crudely done by some pointed instrument.

Aton studied them. “M-A-L-I-C-E,” he spelled out. “What does it mean?”

Aurelius eased himself down upon the crumbling stump, scrutinizing the mystic letters. His breath grew ragged and his hands trembled; Aton realized with unacknowledged compassion that the strenuous exercise had intensified the man’s ague. “I was not sure,” Aurelius whispered, his tone oddly apologetic.

Aton turned a questioning gaze to him.

Aurelius wrenched his eyes from the ground. He spoke with difficulty. “It is the stigma of the minionette.”

Aton stared into the sky of Hvee, upset and confused by the nymph’s flight. What had frightened her? Was she actually a creature not for the eyes of the skeptic? “Minionette?”

“Man took his legends with him when he went to space,” Aurelius said. “Like man himself, they changed; but the stock is the same. You have heard of the terrible Taphids that consume entire spaceships; of the Xestian spidermen whose web-paintings penetrate all illusion; of the living hell of Chthon, where ultimate wealth and horror make eternal love. But this is the—the fable of the minionette.

“The minionette is a siren, an immortal sprite of untold beauty and strength, able to read a man’s inmost passion. It is certain misery to love her—if love is what you can call the fascination compelled by her comeliness. It—it is said that if a man can only hold back his emotion long enough to force a kiss from her, the minionette will love him—and that is the most terrible fate of all.”

This was the longest speech Aton had ever heard his father make, and the least pretentious. “But she was here. This—can’t be true.”

Aurelius sat still, his eyes tightly closed. “It is a mistake, Aton, to disparage the legends too readily. The minionette was here. Malice—she came for you, Aton—”

“Thanks,” Aton said sharply, growing angry. “This ghost, this spook, this myth came to collect her little boy, the one who believes in her—”

“Try to understand, son—”

“I do understand! A girl was here, yes—a girl playing a game, all dressed and posed, ready to charm a simple country boy—”

“No, Aton. I must tell you what she is—”

“Damn your explanations!” Aton exploded, heedless of the pain in his father’s face. “I won’t have you defending my foolishness or the lewd posturings of an offworld siren. A beautiful woman does not take up with a rustic innocent—unless she intends only to lead him on, laughing at his animal naïvete, his inexperience—”

But while he rattled his sabers at his helpless father, Aton knew, underneath, the dark truth: he loved his nymph of the forest, no matter what she was, what she had done. Next to her, all other women were as rag dolls with painted smiles and breasts stuck on in front, foolish giggles and disgusting moisture. He had had enough of this; at least the nymph had shown him the futility of his existence. He had to go from here. He would go to space, seek her out, and satisfy himself as to exactly what she was—when the act was over. Fourteen years of longing could not be dispatched so carelessly—not when the Family was Five, not when the man was Aton. He would force himself to face it, to face the truth, this time.

Aurelius, so unaccountably talkative moments ago, now sat still, rigid, shriveled. Was the final seizure upon him? No; the man lived. Was the conventional betrothal of his son that important? It was; it had to be—but it would have to wait. “If I return…” he said.

The old man did not pretend confusion. We shall wait for you, the hvee and I,” Aurelius said, opening his eyes at last.